Balenciaga’s sneaker game remains distinctly Balenciaga even as its ready-to-wear collections shift with the times. Alongside Spring/Summer 2025’s streamlined clothes, for instance, Balenciaga debuted its first basketball sneaker named, appropriately, the “Basketball Sneaker.”
Demna, creative director of Balenciaga, has long borrowed from all aspects of culture to feed his output and the results have inspired readymade clothing that simultaneously reframe luxury conventions and earn Balenciaga much attention, of both the good and bad variety.
Not that there isn’t any merit to Balenciaga’s provocations, of course — the fashion house is often so far ahead of the curve that peers and even greater society often don’t catch up until years later, with plenty of those second comers credited for Balenciaga’s ideas.
But in the case of Balenciaga’s Basketball Sneaker, the luxury label is clearly homaging those that came before.
Like, the Balenciaga Basketball Sneaker is plainly drawing from several classic basketball shoes, especially Nike’s Foamposite sneaker.
Its tall, molded design instantly recalls Nike’s hoop-to-street classic, which itself has enjoyed a recent mini-revival with a handful high-profile collabs and the reissue of the Clogposite, a low-top slip-on style.
Supreme, a would-be Balenciaga collaborator, even dished its own iteration of the Clogposite earlier this year. Foams really are back.
But Balenciaga’s Basketball Shoe is more than a mere update of a single existing shoe.
It actually blends cues from progressive basketball shoes of all stripes, from adidas’ Crazy 1 — Kobe Bryant’s trailblazing signature shoe — to, as one Instagram commenter noticed, the Nike Air Zoom Flight Glove from the mid-’90s.
Interesting that all these cues go into Balenciaga’s first-ever stab at a basketball shoe.
Not that this is totally fresh terrain. Balenciaga’s inimitable Triple S was at least partially influenced by beefy on-court silhouettes, for example, though it also drew from running shoes, terribly familiar territory to Balenciaga by now. Hard to imagine anyone actually hooping in any of these things, either, but stranger things have happened.