Spring/Summer 1989

The venue was a children’s playground in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris — not a salon, not a gallery, not any of the spaces where fashion was supposed to happen. The audience sat on borrowed chairs while neighborhood children watched from the swings. The models walked a runway that had been painted red, and as they moved, the wet paint transferred onto the soles of their shoes, leaving tracks that recorded the show’s own passage through time. This was Martin Margiela’s debut, and every detail was a declaration.

The clothes themselves operated as arguments against the prevailing logic of late-1980s fashion. Where the industry offered polish, Margiela offered process. Garments appeared deconstructed — seams visible, linings exposed, edges deliberately raw — but the construction was in fact meticulous. The effect was not sloppiness but transparency: these were clothes that showed you how they were made. Vintage pieces had been taken apart and reassembled into new forms. A waistcoat was constructed from broken plates. The silhouettes were oversized, rejecting the body-conscious glamour of the period in favor of a relationship between cloth and body that felt more honest, more negotiated.

And then there were the Tabi boots. Adapted from the Japanese split-toed sock, rendered in leather with a wooden heel, they were the single most provocative piece of footwear to appear in a Paris show in decades. They left cloven hoofprints on the painted runway — a detail that was half joke, half manifesto. The Tabi would become the house’s most enduring icon, still in production decades later, but in 1989 it was simply strange: a boot that made the wearer’s foot look alien, that refused the elegance fashion expected of shoes. The playground show established everything Margiela would spend the next two decades exploring. He never needed another beginning.