He brought the banality of power dressing into people’s minds with his 2019 “parliament” show, staged in an all-too-real government chamber. He wanted some writers and other front-row types to participate, essentially be themselves, play along with the groupie extras, and I thought, Why not?ĭemna, as everybody calls him - as, indeed, he now prefers to be known - is the most critical, wayward thinker there is in fashion. Gvasalia had come up with the time-trippy idea of imagining that lost Balenciaga season, or as he would call the show - released today - “The Lost Tape,” since VHS tapes were the standard video medium then. It was around noon on November 18, an overcast day in Paris, and at the invitation of Gvasalia, I was about to step through the looking glass, back to the year 1997. “They’re ready for you,” Robin Meason, Balenciaga’s worldwide PR director, said, standing in the doorway of my dressing room. Demna Gvasalia was still 18 years off in the future. An unknown Nicolas Ghesquière was about to take over. It’s safe to say that nobody noticed that Balenciaga, without a designer, skipped that season. Let’s see: Martin Margiela created his landmark collections based on the Stockman dress form Raf Simons launched his first runway show, the so-called School Boy collection, featuring suits as well as hoodies in a ratty Paris nightclub John Galliano staged his first shows for Dior Hedi Slimane was burning up the runway at Yves Saint Laurent Homme Helmut Lang was preparing to leave Vienna and resettle in New York, where he would shake things up and in Milan, both Miuccia Prada and Tom Ford of Gucci endorsed the trend of plain tailoring and monochromatic black for the fall of 1997. But a full-scale revival was unlikely, given how much the Balenciaga name had faded over the decades - and given what else caught the eye in 1997. It was because of his designs that Barneys New York picked up the label. Thimister, a baby-faced Dutchman who kept a menagerie of taxidermy in his elegant apartment, had brought Balenciaga some attention with his well-crafted minimalism. Sometime in late 1996 or early 1997, Josephus Thimister left the house of Balenciaga, where he had been creative director for five years, to start his own label in Paris. Photo-Illustration: by The Cut Photos: Courtesy of Balenciaga