If Tanks Drunk Fanta:
On Balenciaga’s Triple S and the Domestication of the Military-Industrial Complex

Deng ZiYan

I: The Thesis: War Domesticated Into Product

Let’s suppose as speed theorist and urban planner Paul Virilio does, “that history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems” (Virilio 90). Fashion then, but more generally consumer goods and the ecology they circulate in, are artifacts of a kind of militant vanguard—that the advances on the battlefield eventually find their way into industrial or everyday design, wherein some trends or products are ongoing experiments with recycling and mutating elements of military planning or principle, acculturated for consumers. In place of assault, the goods are repurposed to signify and sell.

II: Some Examples

By way of a few scattered and selective examples, the Internet, now a place for cat videos, knowledge, and porn, owes much of this initial ARPANET architecture to the Department of Defense. After the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, invaders from the north introduced fitted tunics and hoods into clothing styles, changing the course of fashion. Duct tape only got its industrial boost after an ordinance-factory worker, and mother of two, wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt personally to suggest a new way of sealing ammo boxes. The Crusades had a startling effect on fashion, bringing back luxurious Oriental fabrics and new styles from conquests, whilst microwaves were accidents developed during the development of short-range military radars, now domesticated as a weapon of mass destruction in the war we declare on leftovers. GPS, later commercialized to help you find your way in a new city, was the product of the Cold War to help keep track of nuclear submarines within an accuracy of ten meters. Balenciaga’s Triple S shoes, psychically at least, are miniaturized tanks, which run on Fanta. 

III : An Off-Road Detour

Consumers often enjoy play-acting war. For some more masculinized tastes, the display takes the form of a direct and overt reference to the battlefield, from projections through the actual purchase of guns and knives, to dog-tags or camouflage jackets. For the rest of us betas, the military “form” is more often than not adapted, softened, segmented, or localized into secondary or tertiary expressions, so its aesthetics can be made to appeal to even the most pacifist consumer not overtly infatuated with war. Doc Martens still distantly denote the stricter discipline of the barracks, the wearer belonging to some marching tribe in a vaguely intimated war, but its look is easily offset or complemented with the right earrings or visible lacy bra. Cargo pants, the staple developed for the warzone, now belong to the forty-something-year-old-clearly-not-a-Bravo-to-Zero-type dad. Where other pants would have sufficed, the Cargo Pants Dad wears his repackaged military derivatives under a sense of sartorial “utility,” involved in the secondary demands of logistics and efficacy—a man on the move. Whilst his multiple pockets are often empty, it’s the denotation of a certain survivalist preparedness that's important, if not on the theatre of combat, then at least in the theatre of turning his shopping or hiking experience into a skirmish or a reconnaissance. 

More direct descendants from the military, like the Jeep, were made almost directly (one could say “nakedly”) wholesale available to consumers. Morphed over time, perhaps it's a sign of progress that today they even come in pink. What was being purchased in a sense was a domesticated play-acting at war, allowing journeys to feel like missions to accomplish. For all its initial bravado, the purchasing of a Jeep, especially in urban settings, isn’t all that distant from modern so-called “escapist” activities such as war re-enactments or LARPing—their selling point in part being one of fantasy, a narrative within which the driver may insert him or herself. The more beefed-up original Hummer—too based on warzone Humvees—sold directly to this sensibility, marketing to civilians with the right amount of money and disposition that they can get to experience a simulation of patrol and policing as they buy groceries. 

In order to make the purchase of Hummers more appealing for different consumer profiles, the later domesticated “softer” versions began to minimize direct reference to its battleground origins in their design, instead placing the accent (like our dad-cargo-pants) on military euphemisms of utility and logistical excellence. In some ways analogous to how language is transformed to facilitate cognitive ease of otherwise brute fact (i.e. “torture” becomes “enhanced interrogation”), where the first H-1 Hummer’s main point of pride was selling itself on its inheritance from the military in its product description (as close as possible to “the real thing”), later H-3 models and the newly revived EV are cognitively bloodless, repackaging force as a technical prowess and procedure.  In lieu of IEDs or “enemy combatants,” the target becomes the natural landscape itself, with terrain now visualized in its promotional material as something to be conquered tactically, with a vehicle capable of “off-road dominance” that can “negotiate grades of 60%,” and “tackle toughest off-pavement obstacles,” providing “a towering ground clearance made possible by specially engineered 35" Goodyear® Wrangler Territory tires for an optimal performance” etc. (GMC nd).

Nevertheless, whether the “hard” Hummer or the subsequent “softer” domesticated models, an essential feature being offered in different configurations is that of a vehicular fortress, which, however neutered from the original, still manages to antagonize or minimally imply hostility by virtue of signifying a certain impenetrability. Sealed within its comfortable interior, it presents a “cabin […] designed with an unprecedented combination of innovation and luxury in mind, […] intergalactic travel and otherworldly landscapes are the inspiration” (GMC nd). That SUV vehicles in general are in many ways impractical for daily life is beside the point. Like other military forms that are making their way into common consumption, their function is in carrying out an (re)enactment, a practice drill of preparedness befitting our climate of perceived instability. It shouldn’t be surprising then that fear drove the Hummer; instructively its sales rocketed after 9/11. By way of offering psychically individuated defensive units, where perceived instability, terror, or civil unrest looms, vehicles like these offer assurance, appealing to the conservative impulse of fortifying oneself, replete with gadgets and plush leather seats so one is also allotted a sense of a homely bunker—secure and comfortable. What the consumer defends is no longer, strictly speaking, their homeland, but to have their purchasing power preserved—their right to individuated comfort and luxury.

Whilst the Hummer may borrow this signification quite openly from the military, this “psychic security” is not limited to the conflict minded or even the paranoid. From NSA revelations of spying, to the clamping down of BLM protests through the enlisting of the National Guard (whereby even local police officers adopted hardware and tactics from the military—effectively viewing its own populace as possible counter-insurgents), fears or mistrust are not necessarily unfounded. The Hummer itself is only a more blatant reaction, but the psychic import of asserting one’s private and luxurious space extends visibly to the subtler domestications and designs of other vehicles, from the Land Rover to the pacifist soccer mom in a Chevrolet Traverse. Implicitly reliant on conventional gender norms, the soccer mom minivan often triumphs itself as a faintly masculinized vehicle befitting the image of a matriarch-in-command, nesting her children in the back and patrolling in and out of suburbia, deploying them in their various activities. Removed from its overt combative function (but imbued with a utilitarian one), Jeeps through to minivans and, on a much smaller scale, the Balenciaga Triple S, find themselves adapting to a new coded signification of “defensive luxury,” a sort of selective pressure placed on their forms from a perceived outer volatile environment. Exacerbated by COVID, the intangible commodity of psychic security (and a sense of “personal space”) will in the coming years likely play a prominent role in reshaping facets of design. Pessimistically, we might be in for a period of new and novel ways of signifying boundaries, making sharp delineations through decorative armor about who are insiders, and who are outsiders. 

IV: Dad Shoes

As Hummers or Jeeps have become domesticated consumables, ways of posturing (or prefiguring) a spectral war, so too walking can also be transformed into a marching act, with different demographics having their feet turned into metonyms of militant motivity. More direct referents such as the goose-steppy Doc Marten have already been mentioned, but you may note in passing too how these boots more generally, for some, also occupy a mildly pleasurable masochism in its implied soldierly discipline, the wearer investing much into their up-keep and polishing. The so-called “dad shoe,” on the other hand, whilst not strongly connotative of the military, much like its complementary middle-aged cargo-pants, connect at least mildly to this secondary signification of being vehicles of personal ambulatory and logistical excellence. On the surface, this is what the Triple S range in Balenciaga ironically mocks, for just as it’s inherently a little humorous to think of the Hummer driving to a picnic or struggling to find parking, so the irony being re-appropriated is derived from a contradiction; the forty year old man with athletic footwear who never runs—the dad with running shoes who’s going nowhere. Too slow to keep up with current trends, the dad shoe is an emblem of exile, of choosing comfort over virility. Strictly speaking, what’s being abducted in the design of the Triple S isn’t simply the form of a particular Nike or Reebok by Balenciaga belonging to a specific time and place, but rather also a particular stereotype, namely that species of dad beloved in sitcoms—the neutered patriarch bereft of true authority, the dopey dad with his soft body. 

This might be the Triple S’s stated starting point, but it does more. It adds to it. It re-armors it. With ornate additions and extra soles, the dad shoe is turned into an accessory resembling tires or tank tracks. Its original practical function and signification of “being on the move” is subsumed and buried under the weight of a Baroque-like excess whose new message comes to resemble that already mentioned of the Hummer, of both being defensive and luxurious. Where earlier “dad shoes” might have been mocked for being “out” of fashion, Balenciaga’s Triple S’s have made them “in” by making them almost militant, with the feet encased like bunkers. For the male line of these shoes, it merely gives walking a tank-like sheen, but its designation as a dad shoe worn by women also gives it an extra charge. Like the office “power suits” women began wearing in the seventies and eighties or the less radically inclined '“boyfriend hoodie” sold at GAP, the added dimension for female Triple S wearers is that of inhabiting a “shell” or skin of a prior “male.” In its re-imagined form, it’s as if they are the spoils of a vanquished opponent, being worn and touted like ears on necklace. Where the traditional heel and the #MeToo movement might have clashed over femininity, Balenciaga has offered the feminine foot militancy and camouflage—a way of giving itself the element of surprise by inserting it amidst (or within) a (de-)masculinized symbol.

V: Comfort as Combat

Balenciaga is not exclusive in the trend for signifying a sort of “excessive” comfort—nor, it should be noted, is its entire catalogue coterminous with it. Nevertheless, it’s clear that in the Triple S is an explicit reveling of opulence intended to read antagonistically as “vulgar.” Vulgar not only in the sense of its obvious display of playful mutation, parasitic on a referent outside of its usual system (the unfashionable neutered dad), but also in the sense of running contrary to norms of  “good taste,” defying the dictum of the self-restraint pricier goods tend to impose on fashion items in order to signify elegance and sophistication. Triple S’s are high price tags without the accumulated “cultural capital”; it celebrates itself as nouveau riche, more inured with displays of excess and its ability to squander these resources than highlighting its competency and refinement. 

Taken further into the domain of politics, class, and militancy, the Triple S forms a loose alliance with sweat pants, UGG Boots, or other trends for ironically “ugly” design. On the surface, this may seem fairly unrelated to tanks and Hummers, but the UGG boot, for example, overlaps in several aesthetic domains. Divorced from its original “functionality” as things to keep Australian surfers’ feet warm, the UGG drifted for a long time outside of mainstream fashion. Eventually migrating inwards from this exile, its appeal lies in its transformation as an object of fortified comfort. For the urban consumer, that they are comfortable and cozy is not to be denied, but as important was the display of being able to take the comfort and coziness of home into the streets. Like the Hummer or Triple S, the psychological import of the UGG reveals something subtle about a fractured or paranoid democracy, and the primacy of establishing individualized comfort in a context where it’s either perceived to be under attack or else important to signify as a status symbol because comfort (tied inexorably to consumption) is celebrated as integral to identity. 

In lieu of actual physical violence and combat, the military function of a fortress is instead folded into everyday design as a class function, prolonging indefinitely a form of social hostility between insiders and outsiders, residents and migrants, haves and have-nots. In real warzones, armored vehicles patrol contested borders to notionally protect the freedoms of a state—inland, its citizens patrol the streets and catwalks, armored as budget or inclination allows to preserve individual luxury or comfort. Like large noise-canceling headphones, plane seats divided by class, electrified walls dividing shanties from villas, tinted car windows, or puffer jackets, the UGG and Triple S have their primary functions like the others (to dull out external sounds, to stop people peering into your car, to stay warm and cozy), but it is in their secondary function that these disparate items begin to connect in aggregate with the larger economy built around the constitution of modern bubbles; casings, elaborate chrysalises formed and cocooned around the body and sealing itself (at least selectively) from the notional burden of civic life. To have walked around outside in one’s home attire of sweat pants and UGGs just a generation or two ago would’ve been seen as almost an affront to decency, the actions of someone decadent and too lazy to try with the rest of us to put in a modicum of effort into a restrained public visage. It’s indicative that today it’s morphed into a trend. More aggressively than the duff brown UGG, the Triple S takes the implication a step further, even if only playfully. It can afford to be exclusionary, to be in flagrant about its excess, its wealth to be paraded as much as defended. 

Work Cited
GMC. “The World’s First All-Electric Supertruck” nd. GMC.  https://www.gmc.com/electric-truck/hummer-ev. Accessed on: January 2nd 2021. 
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics, South Pasadena, Semiotext(e). 2006