#margiela presentation 1994

[jinxproof]

Martin Margiela Presentation (1994)

[myseancedetravail]

SS 1994

A spectacular romance of John Galliano. The leitmotif of the 1994 collection was the story of the Russian Princess Lucretia, who managed to escape from the Royal Palace and break free in search of herself. One snowy evening, she departs, sprinting through the forest in her hooped cage crinoline, her diamonds are hidden in her bustier and only her ermine muffs to keep her warm. Howling wolves are chasing her and the yards of will and taffeta that trail behind her are no match for the prickly terrain, nevertheless she reaches her lover’s humble abode in one piece, with only a moment to spare before she kisses him goodbye and borrows his piped pajamas and boyish tailoring to create a disguise. The main character of the show was a young Kate Moss, who remained loyal to her genius even during the scandal with the Dior house, and asked Galliano to make a wedding dress for her. The lucky few who were invited, had gotten sent a tea-stained, handwritten scroll. 

It was a fairy-tale inspired in part by a Vanity Fair article on remain of the Romanovs and the lost Princess Anastasia, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Jane Campion’s The Piano, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Madeleine Vionnet’s 1920’s bias cut. In true Galliano tradition, a narrative was firmly in place from the beginning to the middle to the end. In a sea of laissez-faire and Margiela-esque deconstruction, Galliano returned to old-world skill and technique to create a moment of pulsatingly original, objective beauty and heartfelt sincerity. To make the crinolines appear more modern, there was a generous dose of transparency in the form of wispy chiffon tops. The song ”Wild and Distant Shore” from the film The Piano, combined with the sound of trebled drummers was chosen for the presentation. Of course, Jeremy Healy operated the music, as usual. 

Prior to this show, Galliano was forced to skip a season due to financial reasons, and after it, he lost his backer and his studio space. Anna Wintour and Leon Talley, who were very much impressed by Galliano’s efforts, introduced him to investors.

The show had an incredible impact and support came in the extensive editorial coverage devoted to Galliano in the March 1994 issue. Two major spreads by Grace Coddington and photographed by Ellen von Unwerth and Steven Meisel showcased the best of Princess Lucretia. 

[vaniitas-store]

You might have spotted the Margiela label in our stories when we uploaded the stitched tartan skirt. So finally we're proud to present another extremely rare grail: a Margiela tartan top from the 1994 collection where garments of past 10 collections were re-editioned. In our archives you can find the already sold FW1992 version for reference, worn on picture 2 by the model on the right. Most of you know Martin regularly re-editioned pieces from previous collections. How could he not? All his designs remain timeless, see this 30 (!) year old top. So it is always fun to trace back a piece in the Margiela fashion family tree. Almost a little treasure hunt. Because, a treasure, it is. Now online and paired with Maison Martin Margiela grey tartan skirt with exposed white stitches — spring 2002 And Maison Martin Margiela 6 black maxi skirt with slit and outer hanger loops — spring 1999 #archivemargiela #margielaarchives #margiela @maisonmargiela https://www.instagram.com/p/CYHpOOjL1Nh/?utm_medium=tumblr

[black-is-no-colour]

The Story Behind Hamish Bowles’s Maison Margiela Artisanal by John Galliano Met Gala Look

By Hamish Bowles, published by Vogue on 08 May 2019. Photography by Mehdi Lacoste.

John Galliano was always a star. When I started on my Foundation course in the early 1980s at Saint Martin’s School of Art, as it was then known, he was already a supernova of the fashion department, his exquisite drawings setting him on a sure path to becoming an illustrator. He inspired me to decide on a career in fashion rather than costume design (I had been torn), and after the Foundation course, I stayed on at Saint Martin’s to pursue just that. As John worked on his degree collection the following year, he holed up in the college library, hidden behind stacks of reference books that served a double purpose: They defined his private work space and helped to shield his jealously guarded sketches from prying eyes. As it turned out, John had taken inspiration from the Incroyables—the male and female dandies who emerged in the wake of the French Revolution with their own exaggerated versions of revolutionary style. He even burnt the edges of his drawings and dripped candle wax over them to create the illusion that they had been salvaged from an aristocrat’s ransacked mansion.

The collection was sensational—Joan Burstein, who ran Browns, London’s most fashionable boutique, bought it in its entirety. John couldn’t afford a taxi to transport it, so he wheeled it on a dress rail all the way to South Molton Street, where Mrs. B put it in her window and Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross bought pieces right out of it: They were his very first clients. John turned down a job offer to become an illustrator in New York and instead set up his eponymous brand there and then on a wing and a prayer.

I wore pieces from that first collection—waistcoats made from patches of 18th-century-style upholstery silks and sprigged cottons, jersey long johns, and vast organza shirts tying at the throat with a huge jabot. (John has re-created one of these looks to complete an ensemble built around a coat from this collection that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume department has recently acquired and that is showcased in Andrew Bolton’s brilliant “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibition.)

The following season, John didn’t have the money to stage a fashion show, so he did a presentation instead in an old artist’s studio off the King’s Road. This collection was based on a 1920s cartoon in the satirical British weekly Punch titled Afghanistan Repudiates Western Ideals, and it explored a collision of Occidental and Afghan dress in John’s characteristically intriguing way. One of my ensembles from this collection—including a knee-length skirt that caused a sensation in Paris when I wore it to the collections that season—is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibition “Gender Bending Fashion.”

As soon as I heard the theme of this year’s Costume Institute show, I thought it would be the perfect moment to work again with John, who has found expression for his unquenchable creative force once more at the Maison Margiela. John had already made me a bias-cut black satin evening suit that evoked Shalom Harlow’s look from his unforgettable Fall 1994 show in Paris socialite Sao Schlumberger’s empty Louis Seize mansion.

To my great delight, John was soon on board. I sent some inspiration images of my eclectic pantheon of camp icons, including Mrs. Slocombe, the character with the Elnett-hairspray-bottle hair in ever-changing pastel hues, from the British sitcom Are You Being Served?; Quentin Crisp; Barbara Cartland; and Jazz Age aesthete Stephen Tennant. Together with John’s partner, Alexis Roche, we looked at looks from the Martin Margiela Artisanal Men’s Spring 2019 collection and isolated some silhouettes that we thought could work for me.

Source: Maison Margiela

At Saint Martin’s, John and I shared an inspirational mutual friend in the indubitably camp form of David Harrison, who was studying in the Fine Art department, had once improbably been scouted to front a punk band to be called the Sex Pistols (Johnny Rotten got the gig), and worked a Teddy Boy look that he accessorized with white winklepicker shoes, a peroxide quiff, and a pom-pom clipped white poodle dyed shocking pink who often appeared in his artworks. John’s studio had produced a frenetic collage print that was worked not only into the clothes but the runway itself, and that incorporated an Yves Klein blue poodle in everything from jacquard to tufted embroidery. I wondered if the poodle couldn’t go pink in homage to our camp friend?

Meanwhile, John’s studio sourced a jacquard cravat in mauve from Charvet, the storied Parisian men’s outfitter, and a selection of textiles in shades of grape and wisteria. (Charvet also made the shirt, and I found some Pepto-Bismol pink cufflinks in my own closet that the sculptor Andrew Logan had made for the John Waters high-camp superstar Divine in 1987. These would be my talismans for the night.)

When I went to Paris for my first fitting, after an initial visit to take measurements, John wasn’t in town, but Raffaele Ilardo, Margiela’s inspired head fitter, and his associate Jung A. Park were there to attend to all the finer points. There was already an amazing sample of the jacquard with the electric-pink poodles, and of the ostrich trim that John had instructed be embellished with metallic lurex threads to catch the light on the red (pink) carpet. (“Invisible to the naked eye but will pop in pictures, trust me,” he said.) Ilardo apprenticed with the legendary tailor Paquito (who carved Karl Lagerfeld’s most amazing suits at Chanel Haute Couture in the ’80s and ’90s), and he had made the most beautiful toiles, with a jacket that sat perfectly on my shoulders without adjustment and had a beautifully constructed rising roll at the top of the sleeves. The cape was constructed like a Victorian visite, with openings for the arms and subtle shaping in back. It was so perfectly constructed that I could have worn the toile itself.

Raffaele Ilardo working on the toile. Photographed by Alexis Roche.

“I advise that cape is rehearsed up and down steps if you can,” said John after he reviewed the fittings videos from afar. “No angle must be left to chance but still must look spontaneous. Every swish must be ingrained in the subconscious, and always imagine that Avedon is following you. A sudden knock at the door works wonders for that frozen-eyes-to-the-left look. Never forget Avedon is your focal point.”

A little over two weeks later, with the clock ticking before the Gala, I returned to Paris for a final fitting with John in the house. To my amazement, the entire ensemble had now been made, including the wide-toed Mary Jane shoes, shown in patent but specially remade for me in violet satin. There were two options of subtly different lilac, for a sheer sock dotted with a point d’esprit effect that was faintly obfuscated by the crushed hairs on my legs and would definitely be showcased, as the short pants hovered only a little below the knee. John gave my lower calves a long, hard look. “You’ll wax them just before the gala,” he instructed firmly. (“Always better when viewed through sheer, tons of moisturizer 15 mins before socks are put on,” he advised nearer the day.)

“It’s unbelievable,” I said when I saw the cape arranged on a tailor’s dummy in John’s light-flooded Margiela atelier. “It’ll only become unbelievable when you start to wear it,” said John. And, sure enough, when I put on the cloak and began walking up and down the studio and it caught the air in its massy volumes, it lifted up like a cloud, and, despite the thick feather fronding, seemed almost as light as one. “La légèreté!” John proclaimed exultantly, “It looks like a canvas, like you’re coming out of a painting.” I used the Margiela staircase to rehearse maneuvering the cape up and down the pink carpet, and I tried to work it from every angle, thinking by turns of Dietrich and Dovima and Proust’s beloved Comtesse Greffulhe. (“I love that little coyness!” said John. “It’s a Dorian Gray moment!”)

I’d asked John’s longtime collaborator and my great friend Stephen Jones for thoughts on something for the head (he concocted the custom top knots for the “Camp” exhibition mannequins) and he designed a wonderful tiara bandeau made of Swarovski crystals that were custom-produced in the required lilac hue and, like those lurex fronds, would add some pink carpet dazzle. John pronounced it a “very cool touch” and suggested “surfer pink” hair to match.”

On the eve of the gala, I submitted to leg waxing and sundry other beautifications (“Lymphatic drainage on face the night before always refines,” John had counseled, and thank you, Tracie Martyn, skin alchemist). On the morn, I went to the Greenwich Hotel to be ministered to by the brilliant Teddy Charles and his assistant Satoshi Ikeda, alongside Amber Valletta, and then I hied up to the St. Regis in a white Maserati to meet John, Alexis, and Raffaele and practice some more swishing and strutting in the hotel’s ballroom under their watchful eyes. “The Japanese kids are going to go mental for it,” said John of my Savile Row meets School Boy meets Comtesse de Castiglione lewk. Stephen fitted the tiara, which perfectly framed those Teddy-tweaked waves.

“Command your space!” said John as I headed out, “Hamish, it will be a riot!” How right he was.

Hamish Bowles at a fitting for his first custom Margiela look in 2018, photographed by Alexis Roche.

Source: Vogue.com

[kentonramsey]

According To The Met’s New Exhibit, The Clock Is Ticking For The Fashion Industry

For a fashion exhibit whose theme is time, it’s ironic that the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s “About Time: Fashion and Duration” is, as a result of the pandemic, opening almost six months later than anticipated. Yet, during a year that feels both frozen in time and flying by faster than any before it, the show, which looks at the relationship between fashion and time through designer ensembles, feels perfectly punctual. “Fashion is indelibly connected to time. It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times, serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece,” said Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, in the press release. “The exhibition uses the concept of duration to analyse the temporal twists and turns of fashion history.”

Made up of two main rooms, that are designed as oversized clock faces, “About Time” explores this theme through two timelines: chronological — tracing 150 years of fashion, from 1870 to the present, in honour of the Met’s 150th anniversary — and cyclical — exploring the past and present by linking trends and styles in a more abstract way. Within each “minute” of the clock setup, two garments are featured side-by-side. 

Featuring mostly black pieces — to “make the comparisons between the pairings immediately,” according to Bolton — the brands selected range from heritage (Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Givenchy) to avant-garde (Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela) and unabashedly modern (Libertine, Off-White, Hood by Air, Rick Owens). The theme of time is further expanded using concepts from philosopher Henri Bergson and writing from Virginia Woolf. (The exhibit opens with a quote from Woolf’s Orlando, and quotations in the exhibit are read aloud by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore, who all starred in the 2002 movie The Hours, based on the Michael Cunningham novel that was inspired by Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.)

The first room sees 60 looks in a barely lit, round room with a black backdrop, with a swinging, ticking pendulum at its centre. Pairings, arranged in chronological order, focus on the evolution of fashion and the influence of the past on modern designers. An 1895 double-breasted wool-twill coat is juxtaposed against a 2020 JW Anderson coat with an oversized leg-of-mutton sleeve that could be confused for its older counterpart; a 1902 Morin Blossier riding jacket, embroidered with gold silk-and-metal thread floral motif, is presented next to a waistcoat of jacquard woven silk that Nicolas Ghesquière, who looked to the Met’s fashion archives in the past for inspiration, created for Louis Vuitton in 2018; and a 1938 Elsa Schiaparelli evening jacket featuring mirror-like, Versailles-inspired designs on the front is shown next to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1978 “broken mirrors” jacket (latter is pictured below).

The second room — a winding, mirrored space that sends all senses into overdrive after the darker section — features an additional 60 ensembles that are matched up using less-clear parallels ranging from silhouettes and motifs to materials and techniques. As such, it sees the sculptural 2012 Iris van Herpen masterpiece that Solange wore to the 2018 Met Gala alongside an ivory 1951 Charles James silk satin ballgown (pictured below); a 1983 Karl Lagerfeld Chanel silk crepe dress, layered with trompe l’oeil necklaces and bracelets and belts of pearls, next to Sarah Burton’s 2019 Alexander McQueen crystal-embroidered tunic; and the 1994 Gianni Versace safety-pin embellished dress, famously worn by Elizabeth Hurley, with a 1977 Sandra Rhodes mini with safety pin detailing. While the museum notes refer to these less linear pairings as “disruptions,” today, they feel less like anomalies and more representative of the modern fashion industry — one that, at some point, abandoned looking at the outdated ideals of the past and has begun to find inspiration in the world and the people around them. 

According to Vogue, having time to revisit the “About Time” exhibit, allowed Bolton to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, and “include more Black, indigenous, people-of-colour designers.” In a delightfully ironic pairing, Off-White’s dress, that reads “Little Black Dress,” stands next to, what else but, the Chanel dress that popularized the timeless fashion staple. A vest look from Shayne Oliver’s Hood By Air, the cult-favorite brand that just announced a comeback after a hiatus, likewise makes a clever pairing with a Helmut Lang (where Oliver was a designer in residence) harness ensemble. Patrick Kelly, Olivier Rousteing, Stephen Burrows, and Xuly.Bët’s Lamine Kouyaté round out the exhibit’s roster — starting what Bolton said will become Costume Institute’s “lifelong commitment” of featuring pieces informed by race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, rather than just aesthetics. (This may prompt many to say, “About time.”)

The exhibit tackles another topic that has become very timely as a result of COVID-19. With factories and warehouses forced to close down during lockdown in the spring, the pandemic has forced fashion to take a hard pause, as it was unable to complete collections. This prompted many brands to re-evaluate the constant churning of collections, that not only has a detrimental effect on the environment but also on the designers’ creativity, and look into other solutions, like upcycling. This seems to be the conclusion that “About Time” wants you to arrive at, with the exhibition ending with one of the few non-black looks in the exhibit: a white patchwork gown from Victor&Rolf’s spring/summer 2020 haute couture collection. Made from leftover fabric swatches, the strapless gown — shown suspended above ground in its own mini-room — is, according to the museum notes, a metaphor for the future of fashion, one that includes collaboration and sustainability. 

This leaves viewers with a definitive conclusion, which isn’t always a given when it comes to art: The fashion industry needs to continue to embrace sustainability, as well as collaboration and diversity, if it wants to stay relevant and thrive. It’s easy to say that only time will tell if it will; many have over the years. It’s much harder to ignore the clock that has definitively started ticking. 

The Costume Institute’s exhibition “About Time: Fashion and Duration” will be on view until February 7, 2021.

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

According To The Met’s New Exhibit, The Clock Is Ticking For The Fashion Industry published first on https://mariakistler.tumblr.com/

[fakemargiela]

Maison Martin Margiela Fall 1994

“Nine simultaneous presentations took place in shops stocking the collection on the 7th of September at 7 pm local time in six cities: Paris (4 presentations), London, New York, Tokyo, Milan and Bonn. Ten women stood in the shop window and at 7 pm tore paper down revealing the outfits.”

[emilynasr-blog]

Martin Margiela presentation, September 1994.

[micaramel]

Artists: Anders Edström, Elein Fleiss, Takashi Homma, Yukinori Maeda, PUGMENT, Kyoji Takashi

Venue: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo

Exhibition Title: Photography and Fashion Since the 1990s

Date: March 3 – July 19, 2020

Selected By: Misako Rosen

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Video:

Photography and Fashion Since the 1990s at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, installation video, 2020, 00:58

  Images courtesy of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo. Photos by Mitsuhiro Koyama.

Press Release:

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum is delighted to present Photography and Fashion Since the 1990s, an exhibition exploring the relationship between photography and fashion from the 1990s onward.

As the world of fashion has evolved, photography has played a pivotal part in conveying the appeal of garments by fashion designers. At times, images created by photography have appealed more than the garments themselves, and such iconic imagery has symbolized the age.

The 1990s saw the emergence of photographers who went beyond the conventional framework for communicating the appeal of fashion items to create images that appeal to people. Moreover, fashion magazines appeared that took an independent stance in transmitting information. Images created from new points of view influenced people’s thinking and lifestyles. Those images have been referred to repeatedly by subsequent generations.

Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the relationship between photography and fashion has undergone even more changes. In the past, news about the latest fashion shows and exhibitions was transmitted through a limited group of intermediaries: newspaper and magazine editors and writers, for example. In recent years, however, that information has reached the hands of the general public, without a time lag, via SNS platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Moreover, the people on the receiving end of this information are not merely taking it in: they send out their own information, in many forms, of which the tagged selfie is a classic example.

For this exhibition, we have welcomed as its supervisor Nakako Hayashi, who has observed the worlds of fashion and the arts as a long-term editor of the culture magazine Hanatsubaki. Through works by artists in Japan and abroad, the exhibition attempts to explore the relationship between photography and fashion. It displays, in addition to photographs, rare fashion magazines that became major turning points in their time and is accompanied for an engaging look at photography and fashion from many angles.

Anders Edström Born in Sweden in 1966. After moving to Paris in 1990, began working with the designer Martin Margiela, photographing for Maison Martin Margiela, for many years. His work has been published in the fashion and culture magazine Purple and many other magazines. Main solo exhibition: Spreads (Fullersta Gård, 2019); main group exhibitions: Elysian Fields (Centre Pompidou, 2000), Not in Fashion (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2010), The Second Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum formerly known as Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2010) and The Unseen Relationship: Form and Abstraction (Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, 2012).

Kyoji Takahashi Born in 1960. Since the 1990s, his work has been used in advertising and in Purple and other fashion and culture magazines. Solo exhibitions include The Depth of Night (nap gallery, 2016) and WOrld’s End (nap gallery, 2019); group exhibitions include Elysian Fields (Centre Pompidou, 2000). His photo books including The Mad Broom of Life (Yobisha, 1994), Road Movie (Little More, 1995), Takahashi Kyoji (Korinsha Shuppan, 1996), Life Goes On (Korinsha Shuppan, 1997), and WOrld’s End (Blue Sheep, 2019).

Elein Fleiss Born in France in 1968. From 1992 to the early 2000s, published the fashion and culture magazine Purple, applying an independent editorial policy. From 2004 to 2008, published The Purple Journal, a journalistic magazine from an individual perspective. Currently is based in the countryside of southwestern France and is active in photography and writing.

Yukinori Maeda Contemporary artist, leader of COSMIC WONDER. Expresses spiritual spaces, in photographs, three-dimensional works, and paintings, with phenomena he has experienced as his themes. Main solo exhibition: Splashed Ink Landscape: Dragon Palace at Jirisan (Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2018). Main group exhibition: OUR MAGIC HOUR—How Much of the World Can We Know?(Yokohama Triennale 2011). Presently living and working an old thatched farmhouse in the mountains north of Kyoto.

PUGMENT A fashion label founded in Tokyo in 2014. Observes the process by which human actions alter the value and meaning of garments and incorporates that in its clothing creation process. Addressing the relationship between images and people in the fashion area, presents garments for a different viewpoint on conventional values, contexts, and information. Main shows include 1XXX-2018-2XXX (KAYOKOYUKI / Utrecht / n id a deux, 2018) and MOT Annual 2019, Echo after Echo: Summoned Voices, New Shadows (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2019–20).

Takashi Homma Born in Tokyo in 1962. Has published many photo books; author of Fun Photography: Photo Class for Kids (Heibonsha, 2009). Recent photo books include THE NARCISSISTIC CITY (MACK, 2016), TRAILS (MACK, 2019) and Looking Through: Le Corbusier Windows (Window Research Institute, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Walther König, 2020). Currently a visiting professor at the Tokyo Zokei University graduate school.

Link: Group Show at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2OsFCr5

[titoslondon-blog]

New Post has been published on Titos London

#Blog New Post has been published on http://www.titoslondon.co.uk/martin-margielas-paris-exhibitions-celebrate-his-personal-legacy-and-skill/

Martin Margiela’s Paris exhibitions celebrate his personal legacy and skill

An elegant camel coat is pitted against a white wrap-dress, stained with shocking-pink blotches. The alliance between the noble French house of Hermès and the disruptive Belgian designer Martin Margiela seems an unlikely combination. But in Paris, two separate exhibitions—at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Palais Galliera— are looking at the iconoclast from Antwerp.

The decision to show Margiela’s work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, newly shortened to MAD, was encouraged by Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès and president of the museum. “We want to make the museum more exciting and appealing, especially for the new generation,” Dumas said, as he stood amid the crowd of visitors, looking at the ripe fruit of a six-year design relationship between the noble French house and Margiela, from 1997-2003.

The iconoclastic designer, who has never shown his face to the fashion world, is known as the king of the undone and the recycled—and a revelation of what lies beneath. His exceptional skills can be seen in Margiela: The Hermès Years, which runs at MAD until September 2, after transferring from the Mode Museum (MoMu) in Antwerp, Belgium. His talents also tell a fascinating fashion story—especially in relation to a simultaneous Paris exhibition at the Palais Galliera, curated by the “invisible” designer himself.

At this exhibition, the 20 years of Margiela under his own label are not only displayed, but each procedure is explained by the designer, with the support of the museum and its outgoing curator, Olivier Saillard. An example of the Belgian designer’s work are the ‘Tabi�� shoe-boots he created with two toes, and an entire collection in 1997, literally built exclusively on his Stockman dressmaker’s dummy.

At MAD, the most dramatic effect is the colour, that juicy orange of Hermès shown against the white of Margiela, who painted every item in his studio stark white—from floor to ceiling—and even asked his staff to wear white lab coats.

But the noble brand and the imaginative designer are not always so far apart. Using the deep ‘V’ neckline of the Vareuse—once a French sailor’s jacket—the designer’s work for Hermès can look streamlined, graceful and well-suited to the women of a certain age, who appear in videos as lively exhibits.

Some of Margiela’s Hermès pieces look almost like haute couture, for example, coats with a semi-transparent silk cover flowing over fine wool for protection. Other offerings have the bizarre Margiela touch, as in a ‘glove story’ using nothing but unmatched pairs to construct a slender dress. In a similar way, the designer used a collection of engagement rings worked in thread to make a silvered gown.

Margiela never speaks publicly. But having talked to him at length when the exhibition was first presented at MoMu in 2017, I still had vivid memories of what he said—especially when he told me that he wanted to show work that had languished for years in cold storage at Hermès. “The memory was lost,” he told me, explaining that his two decades of creation, 1989-2009, just missed the smartphone and the internet era.

Now that there are two ways to look at the designer’s work, at MAD for his Hermès period and at the Palais Galliera for 20 years of his own creations, I have to ask the question: will the real Martin Margiela please stand up? And I am not even starting to think about the fact that John Galliano has now taken over at Maison Margiela, playing with the same issues of plastic, at its most fantastic, and the entire subject of what lies beneath those sheltering clothes.

The story of Margiela’s Hermès is easy to define. It is about a modern elegance, de-sexualised, with a fresh take on traditional French style. “Fluid is a word we often used—it had to hang off the body,” Margiela told me. And the effect of oversize, which he started around 2000, is evident in his own work.

Critics of the time felt that Margiela could and should have grown Hermès faster and further. During his tenure, he took the iconic Hermès’ hand-rolled scarf and used that technique to edge blouses and tunics. He also played artfully with logos and identity, creating in 1997 a way of button stitching that produced the subtle ‘H’ motif.

Yet he never experimented with the famous Hermès patterns on headscarves and neckties, although he played with hand-printing in his own label, extending the patterned effect on legs and arms.

Spread over a generous space, the MAD exhibition includes short films of the Martin Margiela shows—including the famous 1990 presentation held on scrubland on the outskirts of Paris, where local kids joined the parade. Only just after he had left his job working for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1987, Margiela already showed symbols of his personal style. Clothes apparently worn inside-out and his early use of transparent plastic were in stark contrast to the glamorous style of the over-the-top 1980s. Margiela was clearly forging his own fashion path—a full seven years before he started designing for Hermès.

Kaat Debo, director of MoMu, who was instrumental in the original exhibition, rejoiced in its move to Paris. “I am proud and very thrilled to have this show in Paris, the fashion world’s capital,” she said. “It’s an honour to have Martin’s oeuvre here. I really think he deserves it. And for us at the museum, it is always a joy to travel and see it in a different place and different context.”

“But if you really want to understand Martin, you have to see both shows,” Debo continued. “At Galliera, there is an excellent overview of his own brand. And here at MAD, we see how he translates his DNA for another house.”

The second exhibition, Margiela/Galliera 1989-2009 (on view at the Palais Galliera through July 15) is unique—and not because his name is scribbled in ink at the entrance to the grand building. It is rather the words printed on the exhibition pamphlet: “Artistic Director Martin Margiela”, it reads, above the name of Alexandre Samson, the director of Contemporary Collections.

In an exceptional collaboration, the Belgian designer was in a position to write his own history—or rather to show how he developed his fashion aesthetic in direct contrast to the extravagant 1980s, when he started his career working with Jean Paul Gaultier. From his early training at the fashion school of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he used his knowledge to deconstruct garments, revealing the hidden sewing skills behind linings, stitching and shoulder pads. He even had his mother knit an openwork sweater using broom sticks, adapted dolls’ clothes to create giant Barbies, and produced oversize clothes so enormous that they were twice the normal shape.

“He never used the word ‘recycling’—it was giving life to pieces he liked, and he loved vintage,” Samson said. “We chose the silhouettes together to make the collection he loves.”

That included a huge American mannequin from 1936, which Margiela used as the foundation of his oversize collection. Other original moments in the 1990s included the artisanal dress made from four separate 1940s outfits, and for autumn/winter 1994 when he selected five groups of garments to show in shop windows in France, Japan and New York. A later elaboration in the new millennium was to have two trench coats assembled to have four sleeves.

Having attended Margiela shows in the weirdest places—one in a ghostly, abandoned underground Paris metro station, where I never managed to open the entrance door, and had to view the clothes afterwards—I have many memories and an understanding of what made the designer so utterly original.

Margiela took us to extraordinary venues, from under an ephemeral cover in the wasteland on the outskirts of Paris to a Salvation Army depot. In 1992, the ‘set’ was not one, but two divided areas; one where everything was shown in white, the other in black. The passion with which Margiela’s followers collected his clothes is shown at the Palais Galliera in reconstructions of the compact apartments of Japanese fans who dedicated their small living spaces to their idol.

Looking at the exhibition leaves the impression that Margiela pioneered great things. In 1999, he made an entire collection out of old duvets—anticipating by a decade the fashion for padded puffer coats. His oversize outfits appeared just at the fashion moment devoted to skimpy, body-clinging outfits.

Saillard, the former director of the Palais Galliera, was the instigator of the exhibition back in 2017, when, he says, an interest in Margiela had blossomed again because of the work of Demna Gvasalia, another alumnus of the Antwerp school, who led the design team at Maison Margiela before launching anti-fashion brand Vetements and then designing for Balenciaga.

“When I met Margiela, the idea was to do an exhibition through an exhibition—showing the clothes from each collection as a personal and fashion retrospective,” Saillard explained, saying that the only designer who had shown the same passion for a museum show was the late Azzedine Alaïa.

And from Saillard, a final wise comment, as we looked at Margiela dresses cut horizontally, instead of vertically: “Young people coming here should understand that the problem of creating new fashion is not about a lack of money, but of imagination.”

1/10 Martin Margiela autumn/winter 1995 collection inspired by dolls (left), Hermès (right)

Image: Getty

Martin Margiela autumn/winter 1996 show

Image: Getty

Martin Margiela autumn/winter 1997 collection

Image: Pierre Antoine

Martin Margiela autumn/winter 2000 collection

Image: Pierre Antoine

Maison Margiela spring/summer 1992 collection

Image: Pierre Antoine

Martin Margiela autumn/winter 1989

Image: Palais Galleria

Martin Margiela spring/summer 1993 show

Image: Getty

Martin Margiela spring/summer 1998 show (left), and on display at the Palais Galliera (right)

Image: Getty

An installation of Martin Margiela's spring/summer 2009 collection at the Palais Galliera (left); runway look (right)Martin Margiela spring/summer 2009 show (left), and on display at the Palais Galliera

The post Martin Margiela’s Paris exhibitions celebrate his personal legacy and skill appeared first on VOGUE India.

[yoshidayoshidayoshida]

Martin Margiela AW 1994/1995 Presentation at 10 Corso Como from 10 Corso Como on Vimeo.

Martin Margiela on September 7th presented his Autumn-Winter 1994/1995 Collection on the same date at the same time in nine stores around the world Paris, Milan, London, Vienna, New York, Tokyo.

The concept was to fill up the whole day with the happening.

All his mysterious models wearing silver masks, were not professionals but Margiela’s clients and friends.

[vaniitas-store]

Margiela fall 2005 pieces have been so hard to come by. This is the first cardigan with elongated hood-collar that I've spotted in the wild. Most of these have end up in museums and two were on the 'Hors Normes' Sotheby's auction. I have actually found more 1998 FW flat jackets and 1994 reproduction pieces than hooded garments. Crazy right? So I am very excited to present this one. As there are no runway pictures, here is a FW 2005 look of an editorial (?) With the model wearing a jumper and trench. The version that just been posted online is a grey/blue button-up cardigan that I have never seen before. Enjoy the piece! #margiela #maisonmartinmargiela #margielaarchives #1stdibs #fashionarchive https://www.instagram.com/p/CJvaWj6ATwS/?igshid=b4i1cide7pdk