admin But Demna’s worldview isn’t that hard-boiled. The sneakers were real, and you can already pre-order them for $1,490. They’re dubbed the 10XL, and they are the county fair prize hog of sneakers. A pair in size 42 weighs in at just shy of four pounds. (A size 42 pair of Adidas Sambas is .75 pounds.) That’s actually quite light considering the acres of mesh, TPU, and rubber that comprise the silhouette, which is approximately 14” long, 6” tall, and 11” wide. Picture two large watermelons, shaped like a dad sneaker.
According to Yotka, the post-show chatter was all about the Erewhon collab and the perverse LA-core of it all, rather than the monstrous runners. “Somehow shoes being enormous doesn’t feel surprising,” she told me. “I guess we are living in a post MSCHF world.” Indeed, ever since the Big Red Boots ushered in a new era of freaky viral footwear, sheer enormity is not as impressive as it once was, like when Balenciaga first caused a gargantuan-sneaker sensation with the Triple-S franken-shoe in 2017.
But after the show all I could think about was whether the 10XL represents an apogee of actual sneaker design. Yotka reports that the 10XL is over three times the size of the Triple-S. Can sneakers physically get any bigger? Have we reached the extreme outer limit of production and wearability?
I asked Luka Sabbat for his take. The Balenciaga superfan pulled up to the show wearing another pair of gargantuan sneakers, the Cargo, which debuted in the Spring 2024 collection. The 10XL didn’t come out of nowhere—Demna loves extreme silhouettes, and has been gradually swelling sneaker proportions for years now. At the now-infamous “Mud Show” in Paris, Demna unveiled the exaggerated 3XL hiker, followed by the Cargo, which Sabbat describes as “slightly smaller” than the 10XLs.
The relatively svelt Cargos still presented a few challenges as Sabbat navigated the sun-kissed streets of LA. “I had little to no spatial awareness with my feet, so I was hitting so much shit,” he said. He wasn’t tripping, he told me, but walking up and down stairs was challenging because the size of the shoe exceeded the width of the stairs. Sabbat did not try to drive in them. “You forget how big the actual shoe is,” he said, citing their surprising lightness.
