Sneaker into Smoke

I watched someone turn a Balenciaga Triple S into a bong, and it was more satisfying than any sneaker content I’ve seen in years.

The shoe costs over a thousand dollars. It’s one of those pieces that exists as much as a status symbol as it does as actual footwear—something you look at more than you wear, something that’s partly an investment in cultural capital. Some designers decided to disassemble one on film and repurpose it into smoking equipment using materials from a hardware store. No explanation, no irony winking. Just: here’s what we’re doing and here’s how we’re doing it.

What works is how completely it strips away the mythology. The moment you treat a luxury good as just material, all the cultural weight that made it special evaporates. The limited drops, the resale market, the whole idea that wearing it means something—none of that survives being deconstructed. What’s left is just a shoe’s material, now serving a different purpose.

I notice this partly because I work with design myself. You spend enough time thinking about objects and what we project onto them and you start to see how arbitrary it all is. A Balenciaga is special because we’ve decided it’s special. The price, the scarcity, the mythology—all of it is ceremony. Strip that away and you’ve just got material. Repurpose that material and you’ve made a point without having to say anything.

The project’s best part is its refusal to explain the joke. It doesn’t need to. It just does the thing and that’s enough.