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Martine Rose didn’t even know Balenciaga did menswear when Demna asked her to consult in 2015. (Men’s was always a small operation—it launched in 2002 but Nicolas Ghesquière and Alexander Wang only showed men’s via small press appointments.) Demna was still at Louis Vuitton when he first reached out to Martine to say how much he admired her work (her got her contact info from a mutual friend, photographer Oliver Pearch). She congratulated him via email a few years later when Demna got the Balenciaga job, and he quickly set up a meeting in a Paros café to offer her the men’s consulting job to make the menswear big and exciting. Spring 2017 was the first collection she worked on, which was Balenciaga’s first-ever menswear runway show. She was there for three years (skipping just one season where she had a baby), helping to define the new Balenciaga menswear silhouette, with men’s eventually accounting for nearly 50% of the business.