Paris is known for its abrupt intermittent heavy showers. As picturesque as most days are, there are months when dampness and grey skies coat the historic city. For Parisians, there is little consequence to bad weather — rain eventually clears the streets of dirt and purifies the air of diesel fumes. It becomes a collision of the senses that captures at once the clashes of nature’s disruptions on men and ending with a tinge of optimism.

When rain lands on dirt, it eventually becomes mud and the Balenciaga Summer ‘23 runway show was lined with hurdles of decomposing materials. There is no optimism at play here. Instead, it stages once more an inquiry into the state of the world as fashion continues to saturate itself with differentiating meanings of what wealth, status and luxury represent today. It showcased the aftermath of rain at its most brutal, staining anything and everything that walked on it. The hems of dresses, jeans and sweats were drenched with dirt splatters, and were intentionally destroyed.

Like Parisian weather, Cristóbal Balenciaga was once a disruptor in the French fashion scene. Born in 1895 in Getaria, Northern Spain, the couturier was known for loading his House with a different level of sensationalism throughout the 1950s to 1960s. With a series of works that initially shocked before it managed to convince, the couturier pioneered new shapes never before seen in women’s fashion and had radical designs that gradually evolved as he refined and reworked the same ideas from season to season. Today, his works lay the foundations of modernity, or what one might know now as “deconstruction”.

Balenciaga will always be remembered for its unlikely ascent to the top in the late 2010s. The contemporary reboots of the House have found their voice by proliferating the use of ordinary aesthetics in luxury fashion’s boxed ideals — turning everything it creates into sensations that deeply question the ideals of dressmaking. Here, fashion celebrates the fantasy and the “feeling” it evokes as much as it plays with proportion and construction, sweeping into ideas governed by “what if” instead of “why”.

When current creative director Demna took on the role, it was unlikely he imagined the significance his efforts would make one day. Each collection constitutes several ambitious statements, playing into the tropes that shred the normalcy of daily life by tuning our focus on what we know into exaggerated proportions. From a subdued presentation on deconstruction in his debut to the stark and abrasive in his most recent, the creative director has conceived fashion in ways others have long withheld by opting for the imperfect — something that is due to evolve in the coming seasons.

Yet, that change can already be said of the 3XL sneakers which were released within the Summer ’23 collection — which has Cristobal’s inkling running throughout its form. Available globally across Balenciaga’s web stores and boutiques, its exaggerated proportions of an archetypical running sneaker sees its sole expanding to form a super-wide silhouette which features a patchwork of technical mesh. The 3XL comes in various colourways and a distressed effect version that evokes the shoe’s original vintage sneaker inspiration.