So, too, would Margiela, the man, continue without his brand. His brand would continue without him-under the name Maison Margiela-but the ghost had left the machine. When Margiela officially walked away from fashion, in 2008, it was the end of an era. By wearing Martin Margiela, you could be the height of chic and still claim outsider status. The brand’s telltale four white stitch marks on the back of the garments worked like a VIP card for the conceptually minded. It’s no surprise, then, that through the 1990s and 2000s, his clothes became the de rigueur uniform for the art world, a way to dress fashionably while being attuned to the codes and constraints of fashion as a value system.
Margiela prized the unfinished, the raw, the “wrong,” the repulsion of beauty as much as its attraction, and the ambiguity of in-between states.Įven the man himself resisted the usual designer-genius mythology, refusing to take a bow at the end of his shows, or to be photographed or interviewed. But the philosophy of the wily young art school graduate, who had previously apprenticed under Jean Paul Gaultier, jibed perfectly with the fin-de-siècle mood to turn polished aesthetics on their head, and to question the institutions that created a soporific flow of goods for consumption. When Margiela entered the scene with his deconstructed, inside-out, oversize, show-us-how-it’s-made, process-over-product approach, the fashion industry was a steady supplier of upscale glamour that never dared to put a stitch out of place. His name was Martin Margiela.įew emerging artists come with so much creative cachet as the radical Belgian who almost single-handedly revolutionized the landscape of fashion when he started his label, in 1988. The artist was already well known to most Parisians in fact, more than a few might have been wearing him at the time. Simultaneously banal and enigmatic, this quotidian image of a supermarket grooming product served as an invitation to an art exhibition. Last fall, posters began cropping up around Paris-on storefronts, in subways, and on street corners-featuring a stick of off-brand deodorant.
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