History of a house: Martin Margiela
Father of sartorial deconstruction and creator of the white label. The story of Martin Margiela and the most mysterious Maison in history.
Unlike traditional fashion designers, Martin Margiela's creations are perceived as works of "meta fashion" and he is considered one of the most influential and iconoclastic designers of the last 40 years. Born in 1957 in Genk, Belgium, the designer trained at the Royal Academy in Antwerp and began his career as an assistant alongside Jean Paul Gaultier. In 1988 he founded his Maison Martin Margiela in Paris, where he debuted his first spring-summer 1989 collection.
In search of a definition with which to label Martin Margiela's fashion, full of provocation, mania for the creative process and sartorial mastery to make his garments, the press has cataloged this new approach calling him the father of the sartorial deconstruction technique. Deconstructing clothing meant cutting and reassembling parts of old garments, showing the linings and inner parts, separating and reassembling patterns in a new way. This approach paved the way for a new democratic fashion that has common denominators with the sartorial freedom of the 1970s and favored the use of recycled materials rather than following an idea of fashion and luxury and ostentation. Many define Margiela's fashion as a crossover attitude between minimalism and punk, also due to the use of DIY techniques, patchwork and the decontextualization of materials and objects that acquire new meanings becoming unexpected garments, accessories or jewelry. Corks that become haute couture necklaces, silver forks that become bracelets, and fragments of ceramic plates that are structured with iron threads to become creative vests.
The dominant colors in his first collections were strong colors such as black, white and red. Sarting in the 90s, a new trend began to emerge that was born in opposition to the appearence and ostentation of the 80s and Martin Margiela, as a witness of the time, decided to promote the cult of absence, eliminating all traces of it. He declined personal invitations, refused official photographs and interviews, even faxes and telephone calls, he adopted the formula of the plural maiestaits, always responding on behalf of the Maison.
Little is known about him and the Maison's own strength rested on Martin's absence. Regarded as a true destroyer of the fashion system, the Belgian designer took the life out of clothes by removing his name from the label and becoming a pure abstraction, the legendary label (fixed only by 4 points) turned white to let his creations speak for themselves.
From 1997 to 2003, in addition to his Maison, he dedicated himself to the Hermès women's collections in which he experimented with his minimalist cuts and deconstruction even in the world of leather goods. In 2002, Renzo Rosso, owner and president of Diesel's Only The Brave group, acquired the brand and in 2014 he left the scene for good, leaving Maison Margiela in the hands of current creative director John Galliano.
Many exhibitions, books and documentaries have been dedicated to him, such as the short film The Artist Is Absent, the documentary We Margiela in which the history of the House is told through the figures of the designer's close collaborators, such as Vicky Roditis, Deanna Ferretti Veroni and Alda Farinella and the latest documentary Margiela In His Own World by Reiner Holzemer.
Since his departure from the fashion system in 2009, several exhibitions have been held on the pioneering approach of the Belgian designer: from the historical Martin Margiela (4/9/1615) organized at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam to the most recent Margiela les années Hermès at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Margiela/Galliera, 1989-2009. Recently, Martin Margiela exhibited at Lafayette Anticipations - Foundation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris his fetish artwork as a contemporary artist for the first time.
