BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Martin Margiela

I know it is poetry month, and I usually dedicate the month to the written word, but I can't wait until May to post a video of this incredible collection Glenn Martens just showed for Maison Martin Margiela (Martens, previously here, was at Y/Project and Diesel but just took over Margiela from John Galliano). Fashion journalist Luke Leitch of Vogue was at this runway show presented in a shipping container yard in Shanghai and describes what he saw perfectly:

"As deeply conceived as it was exquisitely surfaced, this Maison Margiela show under the hand of Glenn Martens was close to being a masterpiece. And I only say ‘close to’ because; a) to insist that a collection built on upending the notion of perfection is near-perfect must be wrong, and b) Martens and the Margiela studio seem to be just getting into their stride: much more is to come.

Tonight, we were in a Shanghai container yard. Like every ‘destination’ show, this first-ever Maison Margiela runway outside of Paris was driven by expansion, in this case to preface a four-city tour of four exhibitions dedicated to decoding some core lore—including the much-misunderstood masks—in China. Unusually, though, tonight the destination’s dislocation served the collection. We were surrounded by towers of containers, red, blue, and green, stamped with the names of their operating companies and clients: I saw a lot of Temu. This critical artery of trade for the planet’s greatest exporter beat sweetly against the thrifted provenance of much of the collection: free market to flea market.

Martens and the studio started this collection, which included ready-to-wear and the Artisnal offering, by returning to the process often observed by Martin Margiela: creative upcycling. The first Margiela exhibition, which opens here tomorrow, includes 58 archival looks variously fashioned from wigs, combs, playing cards, and much more thrifted ephemera. Fall 2026’s thrifting started with a group of 19th century porcelain dolls. As well as sparking the straightforward China association, these translated into an incredible 90 kilo dress fashioned from a shattered mosaic of porcelain; its hem splintered and shrieked as it was worn across the rough cement floor. They further inspired the first three odd-numbered looks in which eight layers or so of glassy organza were printed and painted and layered and draped and molded over skirts to create eye-defyingly immersive visual surfaces. These were worn under masks shrouded just enough to reveal the printed, vacant moue of dollface makeup beneath.

Once the porcelain had cracked out of view we saw a series of evening looks presented as skin-like surfaces, with jersey stretched and bonded over the guts of tailored garments so tightly that you saw the outline of the suiting architecture beneath. This was later returned to in a series of leather looks, jackets, pants, and dresses, in which the constructed edges of the garment were left unfinished like rawhide. Martens and the studio then applied the Margelian Bianchetto treatment to garments including an inwardly draped silk gown, tailcoats and pants, and an argyle overprinted mohair skirt suit. The bodice and arms of a quite amazing Edwardian-referencing school ma’am gown were molded in latex-blended white paint, so that the Bianchetto surface of the garment was also its substance: this demanded that its model keep her arms crossed in prim admonishment at all times. Another puckered-surface paint-dress was surfaced with gold leaf to create a garment that was both rich and ravaged.

A few dresses from the 1870s that the studio found in its tour of Paris’s flea markets were drenched in beeswax as if trapped in amber, before being hung and left to drip as they hardened. Not unlike the porcelain dress, these were stressed by the wearing they received on the runway, and left trails of cracked wax behind them. Some more 19th century dresses, long preserved but rendered desperately delicate by time, were mounted on fabric and then removed to leave their imprints on ‘new’ dresses: tattered into matter. Upcycled metal wires, vintage velvets, fringed blankets, furniture jacquards, and brittle tapestries were all refashioned into furniture for the human form.

The draping, very Martens-ian, was wonderful. Complexly whipped and whorled, it surged around the body in turmoils like visible emotional weather events: these were charted in reams of taffeta in matte cream or shiny lavender, as well as the metal wires. Less intricate but still impactful were the tailored looks overlayered with silk and lace that created a sleek collision of gender categorizations, and the gowns in faded florals into which were sliced creamy scars of pleating.

The masks might look unsettling; the original point of them was to divert attention away from the person towards the garments being worn, but today many observers seem to find that this Margelian withholding of identity is somehow offensive by proxy. On the ground, however, the most challenging aspect of this collection was when heelless shoe and floor length hem sometimes disagreed with that rough cement floor. No wobble, however, ever quite led to collapse. In an era of globalization and standardization in which identity is commodified as data, this Maison Margiela was fiercely resistant, spiritually elusive, and beautifully imperfect."

https://www.maisonmargiela.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Margiela

Holy s--t, what an incredible, amazing, and frightening SS '26 collection Glenn Martens (previously here) just showed for his debut as creative director at Maison Margiela--what an explosive way to start his tenure (he was previously creative director at Y/Project and Diesel as well as his own eponymous brand)! Some pieces like the opening plastic encasements looked as if they were consuming the models (Martens said they referenced blown glass). Other pieces gave a ghostly appearance, like sepulchral shrouds. The sense of the entire collection was a deft and deep combination of the original DNA of the Margiela brand (the penchant for collage, the laboratory-like experimentation of hybridizing silhouettes, and love of Frankenstein-ing disparate pieces together), the historical corsetry and scavenged trinkets, baubles, and jewels from John Galliano's (previously here) too-short-time at the house, and of course the twisting volumes of Martens' own vernacular.

The collaged, rummaged effect of the materials (plastic, leather, metal, clumps of tulle) is apocalyptic ("When the world is running down/You make the best of what's still around" said Sting) in addition to being arrestingly layered. Fashion journalist Luke Leitch reports: "A great deal of this Glenn Martens for Maison Margiela debut Artisanal collection is… thrifted! Martens and his teams built a lot of the pieces from second-hand knits and other pieces sourced from Guérissol, a chain of six stores around Paris at which pieces generally cost just 5 euros. So Martens wasn’t kidding when he said: 'the preciousness of showing you are extremely rich just doesn’t fit into the Margiela language. So we’re not going to do a $75,000 dress, all hand-embroidered or whatever, because that wouldn’t fit in here. But we are going to find a different form of opulence and richness, and hopefully somebody a little bit more cheeky will engage with it.'"

And the plastic and metal masks and veils obscuring every model's face was a nod to another Margiela motif that has appeared many times over the years. The result is disturbing, a little eerie.

The showspace itself was styled to reflect the decaying aesthetic created by the garments. Martens said the look was "all disheveled and falling into pieces...I’m from Bruges, which has this whole gloomy, Gothic kind of gloominess." Large photocopied pieces of Georgian rooms with enormous panels of boiserie, marbled alcoves of cathedrals, or dark caves of ancient plaster papered the walls, crumpled, ripped, torn, but patched and cobbled together to approximate its origin.

Every garment and the show feels somehow miraculously fresh and new even though, as the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun. But what is new is how things under our sun are put together and Martens has shown a commanding, supreme imagination. What he created is truly stunning. Please do watch the video below to see the pieces in motion...or not in motion as it were.

https://www.maisonmargiela.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Margiela Co-Ed Collection Spring-Summer 2021 | S.W.A.L.K. II

This incredible film explores in-depth the creation of Maison Martin Margiela's co-ed collection for Spring-Summer 2021 called Sealed With A Loving Kiss. It is a treat to see Creative Director John Galliano at work on every aspect of the collection including the tango theme of the presentation. It is also a treat to see pieces being made, and to peek into the concept of "recicla," the recycle and upcycle approach the house has adopted. Galliano and team discover vintage pieces which they disassemble and use to create new, hybrid creations.

https://www.maisonmargiela.com/us

BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Martin Margiela

When Phoenix-like designer John Galliano rose, redeemed, from his ashes to be appointed Creative Director of Maison Martin Margiela in 2014, it was clear he took over the womenswear line. But I think it is equally clear that Galliano does not have much to do with the house's menswear. This part of the brand is still created by an anonymous collective of designers who have been running the business since the departure of the mysterious, reclusive Margiela in 2009. The mystery of the machinations of the house are not the only unusual thing about MMM. The kind of deconstructionism Margiela and the team have exhibited over the years is just as mysterious. There is something subtle but compelling--even horrifying--about the way pieces of clothing both new and vintage are dissected and stitched together in a Frankenstein way to become completely new garments: an obvious but elusive post-modern approach to clothing design. And this Fall-Winter '16-'17 collection at Paris Fashion Week might be a little more subtle than the typical Margiela collection, but it is all still there: the cummerbund made of fraying slubbed silk, gaffer tape, and jute; a slashed and sleeveless extra-long duffle coat; loosely crocheted trousers with external seams; the bottom half of a sport coat surgically removed and grafted onto a zippered sport top; and hybrid pants with one denim leg and one leather leg. The addition of a motocross, bicycling, and wrestling motif via lycra pieces gave the whole collection an incongruous, unabashed, sexual sense, grafting two different ideas together to make something new, something with friction, something that does not, thankfully, fit into any category.

http://www.maisonmargiela.com/

The Return of Galliano

As I mentioned here on "Oh, By The Way" a month ago, in the fall of 2014, John Galliano was named the new Creative Designer at Maison Martin Margiela (an unusual pairing given their disparate approaches to the art) and would be presenting his first collection for the house--and his first collection since his very ugly and very public fall from grace in 2011. Well, by all accounts, the show yesterday was a tremendous success. Presented, oddly, at the close of London Collections: Men, Galliano's women's wear collection, part of the Artisanal line at MMM, was awash with the DNA of both houses: de-constructed, re-constructed, but swirling with a decaying romance and ripped tulle.

Gone are the Galliano spectacles of yore. In a typical MMM clinical atmosphere (white walls, klieg lights), the show was effective despite--or perhaps because of a lack of said spectacle. The wow factor was in the cut of the clothing and not in the sets or historical references (however fascinating and fun they were when Galliano was at Dior). In this way, the spectacle was still there--maybe even more so. It is kind of like I.M. Pei's glass pyramid on the Louvre: they both bring out what is special about the other. Contrast brings interest. And Galliano's collection at MMM feels like looking at his past work in the sterile light of a lab... and it works.

In attendance at the show: besides a very small group of buyers for extremely high-end retailers and journalists, there was a very select group of friends and supporters like Anna Wintour and Kate Moss, fellow designers Christopher Bailey (Burberry) and Alber Elbaz (Lanvin) and Manolo Blahnik (um...shoes!).

http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/

The Return of John Galliano

After his fall from grace in 2011 (a thoroughly ugly drug and alcohol-fueled anti-Semitic rant at a public Parisian café can do that to a person) and his subsequent dismissal from Dior--and a divorce from his very own eponymous label--John Galliano has returned, clean and sober, and, well, clean. No long blond curls, no oily Clark Gable moustache. Take a look!

Photo: Maison Martin Margiela

Galliano is now Creative Director at Maison Martin Margiela, a very odd appointment considering the brand's extremely clinical/ cerebral/ performance art approach to clothing, but one that has the full support of Renzo Rosso, the owner of Only The Brave, the MMM parent company. And just today the announcement came that Galliano will be presenting his very first collection this coming January 12, 2015 at London Collections: Men. Regular readers know that I cover all the men's shows for January and July, and I will certainly be looking at Galliano's collection for the "Artisanal" line at MMM. Perhaps Galliano will bring some flowing romanticism to MMM. Couldn't hurt... and of course Galliano has always enthusiastically embraced fashion as performance art by embodying a theme or themes. This should be good.

http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Martin Margiela

Have we talked about Maison Martin Margiela before? In the world of fashion, MMM is an oddity, and that's saying a lot. The house's namesake designer is notoriously reclusive (only a handful of photos of him actually exist) and actually left the company many years ago. Since then, the creative control has remained anonymous. What is known is that collections are created by a team of designers, again very mysterious: names are not known and faces are not seen. Much like the Oompa-Loompas in charge of the day to day workings of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, Maison Martin Margiela "workers" ("representatives?" or are they actually the "designers?--no one knows) will helm, chaperone, or otherwise direct press conferences, dispensing impersonal information about the collections and how they were created. And something the house has always been about is a sense of deconstruction (check out their hybridized, subtly Frankenstein-ish Spring Summer '14 collection here), of recycling/upcycling (see their Monoprix trash bag winter coats in this post about several collection from Fall-Winter '12-'13), and of using unexpected materials for clothing in unexpected ways. Generally the MMM collection is about pure experimentation with many pieces never even making it to production. Often other more accessible pieces make their way to retail, but it is the strange, stone-faced, anonymous art studio nature of the house that draws people in.

True to form, their Spring Summer '15 collection at Paris Fashion Week was expectedly unexpected. The hybridization here is much more obvious with halves of business and casual wear sewn together in a sort of schizophrenic Jekyll and Hyde statement. The lab--er, house--used nylons, particularly parachute material (one coat was made from a real vintage parachute) for pants, coats, jackets. At the end of the collection, a series of flesh colored clingy long sleeved nylon tops came out. The sequined and beaded colorful designs (which look as if they are hybrids of vintage advertising crossed with Soviet propaganda material) are chopped up and banded into nearly abstract stripes of color. The look is quite disorienting; it forced me to do a double take and study what was going on to understand it.

http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Maison Martin Margiela

I was prepared to skip over Maison Martin Margiela's '14 Spring-Summer collection but I am glad I forced myself to look closer. The experimental art lab and design collective is known for deconstructing fashion, for putting it under a microscope, or for alienating it to the point where they position themselves outside of the fashion industry itself. They are also known for recycling...or rather I should upcycling, as the word now materializes. And that ethos was quite in evidence in this subtle, blink-and-you'll-miss-it collection.

The bottoms of blazers and suit jackets were cropped and attached, hybridized if you will, onto tops, tees, and shirts with a waist-high belt. A mutated button up shirt featured extra cuffs at the elbows. Sleeveless coats showed their lining, with felting on the outside. And rust-stained fabrics looked as if they have been sitting in a garage for years covered with iron pipes and tools. I am reminded of an old Police song in which Sting sings: "When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around..."

Oh, and kudos to MMM for their casting of real men, a few with some mileage. Pretty boys are a dime a dozen...so bland compared to these authentic, and yes, sexy specimens (I'll take bearded gingers 3 and 4, please...so lovely...*sigh*).

http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/

BEAUTY: Clothing--Paris Fashion Week Misc.

And finally, a few more little comments or things to note about some miscellaneous SS '13 collections...

As we have seen not only here in Paris, but also in Milan the week before, metallic is the thing right now. Acne showed metallic lace ups...

... while Viktor & Rolf showed a fun orange metallic sneaker (along with suits and pieces embellished with mirror!)...

...and Maison Martin Margiela featured a silver shoe that looked like an espadrille, along with some amazing metallic trousers (made of treated cotton). Of particular note: an all black cast of models walked the space at the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild while a live band played some funky rock!

Venerable British clothiers (and dressmaker to H.R.H. from 1955 to 2002) Hardy Amies showed some very special eveningwear. While not technically metallic, the shiny blacks, silvers, and blues sure read as metallic. Maybe it has to do with the op-art print on that jacket, but the cut of these suits feel a little mid-century...

Issey Miyake, taking an active role in his menswear collections after being content to be in the background for eighteen years, used an ancient Japanese paper called washi to create the pieces for his '13 SS collection. Washi is traditionally made of fibers from the bark of the gampi tree, the mitsumata shrub, or the paper mulberry, but also can be made using bamboo, hemp, rice, or wheat. The Miyake studio treated the washi to be water-repellent, and twisted it into large fibers and yarn which were then woven or knitted. It seems like a wonderfully sustainable product, especially if made from bamboo!

Raf Simons is the new head of Dior (so long, Galliano!) but retains his own line. He showed a selection of great, louche shorts suits with a front (or side) slit, looking like the little slit Westwood put in some trousers for the Spring Summer '13 season.

And lastly, on a personal note, I had to show Paul Smith's SS '13 collection because nearly every model was wearing a fantastic pair of the kind of elegant, slim, t-strap sandals I have been looking for this summer! It looks like they come in red, black, oxblood, and spice. I'll take one in each color, thanks.

http://shop.acnestudios.com/
http://www.viktor-rolf.com/
http://www.maisonmartinmargiela.com/
http://www.hardyamies.com/
http://www.isseymiyake.com/
http://www.rafsimons.com/
http://www.paulsmith.co.uk/shop/home/