HERE’S a secret message in to my writing students about this piece: This is the article where you can see me figuring out the deeper meanings of fashion for the first time. I like this piece because you can pinpoint exactly where the subject took hold of me, and I took hold of it.

My Memoir Mayhem workshops will begin again in September.

“Cintra and my amazing classmates helped me dress my trauma — and unconventional life experiences — in sequins and a feather boa, and taught them to dance within 1,000 words at a time. Memoir Mayhem was more healing than seven therapists and showed me the power of sharing my story to support others.”

— Lindsay Thomas

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This article originally appeared in the New York Times in 2007.

I MADE tourists stare at me in a kiosk months ago. Leafing through photographs of this fall’s Nicolas Ghesquiere designs for Balenciaga, I involuntarily said, “Blecch!”

I thought: dislocated Missoni clown suits.

The clothes looked unwearable in the way that the food of ingenious chefs becomes perversely inedible: fiendish experiments wrought in strawberry-dill fish foam and raw poultry.

But morbid curiosity made me trek into deepest Chelsea to the industrially cavernous Balenciaga boutique, set self-consciously into a row of serious art galleries. The visual overload was such that, walking in, I couldn’t help immediately scribbling notes, grabbing at the confetti-blizzard of information. A staff member was quickly dispatched to investigate.

“Usually journalists show us credentials,” said the nervy young sales fellow.

They needed to see my badge?

“I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” I said, sympathetic but unmoved to reveal my identity.

There was too much to describe. Each rack was a discrete planet. A gem-shaped cave painted frosted army green featured a coat inside that looked tailored for Ethel Kennedy out of a Cuban shower curtain.

I needed to ask about the season’s smash hit: a British schoolboy blazer with a Chinese character on the front.

The head salesclerk was a severe woman whose hair was cut in what neo-Nazi skinhead girls used to call a “fringe,” a crew cut with short bangs designed for one utilitarian reason; in a fistfight, you couldn’t grab their hair.

“We have nine of them, but they’re all sold, and all in back,” she said, not offering to show them to me.

“Can I ask how you are describing that silhouette?” I asked, pointing in a curious reverie to the cinched figure-eight shape of a shearling coat.

“You want me to tell you how to describe it?” demanded the Fringe, seemingly appalled that I wanted her to do my job for me.

“No, I want you to tell me how you describe it.”

“I usually tell people to just look at it,” she replied, black nerve gas misting from her venom ducts. I fantasized about helping this delightful woman discover the true, original purpose of her haircut.

“It was inspired by samurai,” blurted the sales fellow in a tension-dispersing but helpful way.

There was indeed a samurai influence in the riveting designs, and also a 19th-century French sailor, a 1920s flapper, a 1960s ski chalet …

Mr. Ghesquiere’s palette achieved a fascinating vintage effect with dulled versions of brightly artificial 1970s colors. A silk dress in gray-washed purple might have been spun from the pelt of Barney the basalt-mining Dinosaur, or dyed with grape Kool-Aid in the Ganges.

I tried on a dress I called “Pocahontas Does the Lindy Hop,” a riot of inch-wide felt strips, unfinished silk and golden beads ($3,275). On the body, it was bonkers — a tube of gathered white silk jutted from the sternum and reached down the front like the parasitic sleeve of John Smith’s pirate blouse.

I wasn’t sure it worked, but it certainly took Navajo quilters six years to complete. It may not have been clothing, but it was definitely art.

I tried a sleeveless turtleneck in dishwater-electric blue, with padded stripes waving up the sides, and the fine tight knit of vintage winter-sport apparel. It was a revelation. The stripes formed a firm serpentine hug up the hips and around the bosom, sculpturing the wearer into an Art Deco fertility vase. This sweater ($565) was a theme with variations in black, red and ivory — a dress Coco Chanel might wear on her snowmobile, a samurai cheerleader sweater.

Gad, I wondered, is Ghesquiere the Mozart of couture?

I finally abused the fragile patience of the staff by trying on one last jacket. It turned out to be the Rosetta stone of Balenciaga for me.

It was a bouclé jacket such as Nancy Reagan might wear, but toughened up: tighter, thicker, more compact ($2,765). The interwoven wools were black and white, with loud sparks of fluorescent primary color going “Bang!” inside.

On the body, the collar was surprisingly high and rounded; the shoulders jutted straight out into hard little puffs. It was a brass horn section: lusty, confident, noisy, strong and regal. An Elizabethan motorcycle jacket for the Lady President of Tomorrow. This was a heartbreakingly generous interpretation of female power: radical chic that still made traditional sense. Its empowering structural muscle could be protective corporate armor, but it was nonaggressive: stronger for being penetrable. Mighty like a rose.

Many unlikely, paradoxical tightropes converged into this impossible, rowdy, schizophrenic, sublime jacket. Ultimately, it revealed something stunningly simple. Like a dream, it installed new doors in an old room, and opened them, revealing a shockingly bright, open, robust new vista of feminine grace. It was refreshing and gladdening to see such courageous invention; an outpour of inspiration with such vivid affection for women.

I was convinced: Nicolas Ghesquiere’s genius is big and bold enough to give nudity a run for its money. It is the work of an angel.

“What do you really think?” the uncomfortable sales fellow asked as I rehung the jacket.

“It’s absolutely brilliant.”

He seemed doubtful and still unnerved that I refused to reveal myself.

I put my arm around him, invincible for having felt Mr. Ghesquiere’s transcendence.

“I am a Critical Shopper for The New York Times,” I said with Batman-like importance.

I let this hover like a platinum anvil, then turned and walked up Balenciaga’s long, echoing concrete hallway into the early darkness, eager to brave the first cold night of fall.

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BALENCIAGA: NOT QUITE SEVEN SAMURAI, BUT ENOUGH