The joy of being 20: Maison Martin Margiela

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Four little stitches. Passionate fashion fans know very well that these are the signature design of Maison Martin Margiela. Since 1988 - when the maison was established by Margiela and Jenny Meirens - Martin Margiela’s designs have been characterised by a white label sewn into the garment with four stitches that can be visible from the back. Apart from being the maison’s trademark, the stitches are also metaphorical symbols used to reveal the intimate construction of a garment.

The construction – and deconstruction – of a Margiela garment is just one of the themes explored in “MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA (20) The exhibition”, that opens today at Antwerp’s ModeMuseum. The exhibition celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fashion house, exploring the main themes that characterised the maison’s designs, collections and fashion shows while analysing fashion, art, architecture and the principles of deconstruction in literary criticism, the main keys to open Martin Margiela’s world.

Throughout the years, going against one of the basic principles of fashion - newness - Margiela deconstructed the old, dismembered and reassembled it, creating an avant-garde form of fashion and allowing the outfits to assume new lives. The debris of the capitalist society - plastic bags and broken crockery for example - were turned into high fashion pieces such as T-shirts and waistcoats. Following the deconstructivist principles, Margiela dissected army socks and turned them into jumpers; industrial paper was transformed into a man’s jacket; coarse linen and cotton were used to make halter tops and jackets resembling the form of an inanimate dressmaker’s dummy, morphing the real body into a dramatic visual deception. Upon coarse linen waistcoats, Margiela applied half a draped top in silk chiffon, reproducing a work-in-progress dress, revealing the complicated syntax of fashion.

The designer’s experiments into art and deconstruction continued when in 1997 he produced for an exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam clothes on which moulds and bacteria grew. The garments were used as symbols of decay and consumption and therefore as metaphors for the capitalist processes of buying and throwing away.

There are designers who often chose to present their catwalks with spectacular shows, but Martin Margiela always opted for conceptual presentations more similar to art installations than glamorous catwalks. Urban spaces often turned into the settings for the maison’s shows: the designer presented his Autumn/Winter 1997-98 collection in three different places around Paris, an abandoned market, a loading bay and a dance school, allowing the models to roam freely, though accompanied by his assistants, all clad in white laboratory coats, a reference to haute couture workshops.

For the Autumn/Winter 2002-3 collection, the white coat clad assistants appeared again, accompanying the models on a dark catwalk, leaving them in their places and switching on the lights before leaving. Later on they returned to present a white cotton handbag in a perspex box, an ironic joke on modern fetishised objects such as iconic designer bags. Rather than wearing the real clothes, for the Spring/Summer 1999 collection, models wore sandwich boards with images of the garments, becoming in this way anonymous advertising boards.

Margiela was also among the first designers who played with the doll/dummy theme: during the maison’s Autumn/Winter 1999-2000 catwalk, life-sized puppets, each operated by two puppeteers, replaced models. These overgrown dolls, almost bigger than their puppeteers, gave a surreal and uncanny atmosphere to the whole show.

Apart from being an interesting exploration of the world of Martin Margiela, the exhibition highlights how the maison’s creations always spoke for themselves: as a reaction to the celebrity status dominating the world of fashion, Margiela never releases interviews, nor allows photograph of himself to circulate, preserving in this way his anonymity.

This extraordinary exhibition at the ModeMuseum is the perfect way to celebrate Martin Margiela’s uniqueness, that perfect blend of conceptual deconstructivism mixed to Guy Debord’s situationist practices, Adorno’s theories and the highest principles of haute couture.

“MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA (20) The exhibition”, MOMU - Fashion Museum, Nationalestraat 28, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium, 12th September 2008 - 8th February 2009.