| How Demna engineered the rise—and near-fall—of the luxury fashion house.  Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker The wild silhouettes, billowing fabrics, and otherworldly accents that define the fashion house Balenciaga under the stewardship of the designer Demna can leave us schlubby normals feeling a mixture of awe and bewilderment. Huge bathrobe-like coats paired with stilettos? Puffer jackets that could engulf an expedition’s worth of mountaineers? Platform Crocs credited as “the ugliest shoe ever made”? But in her essential Profile of the “supposed darklord of luxury fashion” in this week’s issue, Lauren Collins helps translate this outré world to the more bland one that most of us inhabit, and reveals the way that transcendent high fashion eventually trickles back down to earth. “You have been dressed by Demna, at least indirectly,” she writes, “if you’ve recently worn a clunky sneaker or a humongous coat.” Collins tracks Demna’s rise from a hardscrabble childhood in the Soviet Union, and follows him closely as he navigates Balenciaga through a series of culture-war scandals that included accusations that the company, through its ad campaigns, had “sexualized children and condoned child abuse.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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