The Highest Purpose of a €700 Sneaker

The Balenciaga Triple S spent the better part of 2017 being the most loudly discussed shoe in fashion—aggressively ugly by design, priced to make you wince, and worn by everyone who needed to signal they were in on the joke. A status object that derived its entire value from being slightly ridiculous. The people at Dandy Diary, a German fashion blog with a reliably perverse sense of humor, looked at this object of desire and arrived at what is, in retrospect, the only logical conclusion: they turned one into a bong.

With the help of a persona they call Onkel Werner—an uncle type who clearly prefers hardware stores to concept boutiques—they sourced all the conversion parts from a regular DIY shop and built what they’re claiming is the world’s first Balenciaga bong. Ritual unboxing, followed by a tutorial, followed by a functioning smoking device assembled from the season’s most hyped footwear. The shoe that was supposed to announce something sophisticated about your taste now announces something else entirely.

Their stated point was to comment on the sneaker customization scene—the subculture of disassembling expensive shoes and reassembling them as masks or sculptures—and push that logic to its absurd endpoint. A shoe worth more than most people’s monthly rent, rendered useless as a fashion item but fully operational as something you’d use in a parking garage at 11 p.m. There’s a kind of honesty in that trade. High fashion versus working class, they called it. I’d call it the most accurate thing anyone did with a Triple S.