Martin Margiela

Martin Margiela graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1980 and spent three years as Jean Paul Gaultier’s assistant before launching Maison Martin Margiela in 1988. His Spring/Summer 1989 debut, held in a children’s playground in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris, announced a designer who had no interest in the conventions of the industry he was entering. The invitation was a blank piece of fabric. The models wore split-toe Tabi boots that left cloven hoofprints on the painted runway. The clothes were beautiful, but more importantly, they were arguments — against luxury’s preciousness, against fashion’s disposability, against the cult of the designer as celebrity.

The anonymity was not a gimmick. Margiela never appeared in photographs, never gave face-to-face interviews, and communicated exclusively through faxes written in the collective “we.” The house’s garments carried a blank white label, four white stitches at the back its only identifier. This refusal to perform personality was itself a radical position in an industry increasingly driven by brand narrative. Meanwhile, the Artisanal line — numbered 0 — produced some of the most intellectually rigorous work of the decade: garments made from army socks, vintage gloves, broken plates, shopping bags. The Fall/Winter 1995 Stockman collection took the tailor’s dummy as its starting point and produced flat, two-dimensional garments that challenged the fundamental relationship between cloth and body.

Margiela’s influence saturates contemporary fashion so thoroughly that it has become invisible — which is, perhaps, the most Margiela outcome imaginable. The oversized tailoring, the exposed construction, the conceptual approach to materials that Raf Simons, Demna, and dozens of others now practice daily: all of it runs through that playground in the twentieth arrondissement. He left the house in 2009 without announcement, just as he had entered it. His absence is as deliberate as everything else he ever did.