Hourglass

The Hourglass debuted on Balenciaga's Fall/Winter 2019 runway as Demna Gvasalia's first fully realized handbag silhouette, four years into his tenure as creative director. Where the house's defining bag for nearly two decades, the City, was soft and unstructured, the Hourglass was rigid and sculpted, with a nipped-waist body that echoed corsetry and a brushed-metal interlocking "BB" clasp standing in for a traditional zipper or turn-lock. It marked a deliberate pivot in Balenciaga's handbag identity, away from Ghesquière-era slouch and toward Demna's sharper, more architectural sensibility.

The style expanded quickly, from an initial handful of sizes to a five-size range running from Mini up to Large, and across constructions ranging from smooth calfskin to quilted leather, sequins, and croc-embossed finishes, plus collaboration versions such as the Balenciaga x Adidas Hourglass. That rapid expansion, and the shape's near-immediate adoption by fast-fashion copycats, meant the Hourglass saturated the market within a couple of years of launch, a trajectory very different from the City's slow-burn, decades-long relevance.

Kim Kardashian became the Hourglass's most consistent celebrity ambassador, wearing it repeatedly from its earliest seasons and most visibly in a fully tape-wrapped version she carried at Paris Fashion Week in Fall/Winter 2022, an image that circulated widely and kept the bag in the cultural conversation years after its debut.

The bag also became something of an internet talking point in its own right, both for its exaggeratedly curved silhouette and for Balenciaga's willingness to lean into provocation with it, part of the same Demna-era playbook that produced the Triple S sneaker and other deliberately divisive pieces. That notoriety helped the Hourglass hold cultural relevance through the early 2020s, even as the sheer number of dupes and lookalikes on the market gradually eroded some of its exclusivity.