Fall/Winter 1995

The Stockman is a dressmaker’s dummy — the armless, headless torso form around which garments are constructed. For his Fall/Winter 1995 collection, Martin Margiela took this tool of the trade and turned it into the collection’s central motif, producing garments that appeared to have been designed not for the three-dimensional human body but for the flat, static surface of the mannequin. Vests and bodices replicated the Stockman’s shape exactly, their seams following the dummy’s contours rather than those of the person wearing them. The effect was uncanny: clothing that seemed to belong to nobody, that existed in a space between garment and pattern piece.

This was Margiela at his most conceptually precise. The flat garments did not simply reference the tools of fashion production — they interrogated the fundamental assumption that clothing must conform to the body. What happens when the garment refuses to acknowledge the wearer’s form? What does it mean to wear something that was designed for an abstraction? These were not rhetorical questions. The collection answered them on the runway, where models moved through the space wearing garments that maintained their rigid, planar quality against the softness and motion of the human frame. The tension was productive and strange.

The Stockman collection also demonstrated Margiela’s gift for finding conceptual depth in fashion’s most mundane infrastructure. The tailor’s dummy, the lining, the label, the seam — these were the invisible elements that other designers took for granted, and they were precisely the elements Margiela found most interesting. By 1995, the house had established a vocabulary of revelation: every collection found new ways to make the hidden visible, to turn the backstage into the show. The Stockman dummy, stripped of its utilitarian anonymity, became a protagonist — fashion’s invisible armature, suddenly, thrillingly, on display.