Martin Margiela
If you hope to discuss his visual work, sidestepping Martin Margiela’s groundbreaking work as a fashion designer is a fool’s errand. Margiela graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts with a degree in fashion in 1980. From 1984 to 1987, he was French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s assistant. The haute couture house’s dominant vibe of freedom inspired, was infectious.
‘Work with what you’ve got, and imitate, fake, or make what you don’t. Just do it,’ Gaultier advised a somewhat overly serious designer.
Margiela and Jenny Meirens founded Maison Martin Margiela in 1988. One of their very first purchases was a copy machine. And from the first collection on, copying became an immersive practice, where Margiela, like an archaeologist, would wander the halls of fashion history and its studios with an eye for the surreal and a head for conceptual thinking. The heart of the true tailor emerged in the design itself, where seams, patterns, cutting lines, and silk-screened images of accessories from previous collections or other eras would reappear in new designs. Margiela would scour flea markets and charity shops for clothing that had been lived in and had felt the passage of time. For example, he painted worn-out trainers all white. Jenny Meirens shoved him even further out of his comfort zone by bluntly asking why he didn’t just paint everything white. Their first shop had all the makings of an art installation, a completely barren, neutrally decorated space in which garments – including ready mades – played the starring role. That also happened to match Margiela’s unrelenting insistence on anonymity. He never appeared in shows, sat for interviews, or provided substantial commentary. That predilection for anonymity defined the clothing label: an empty cotton rectangle sewn into place by hand. The four white stitches on the outside of the garment became its signature look. It bore the name Maison Martin Margiela. The team was the focus, and his name should be associated with the product, not his face. Models had their faces painted with a heavy steak of black across the eyes, wore wigs backwards, or covered their faces in cotton or silk bags to look like anonymous mummies. All these elements frequently recur in his visual art.
‘All you see is the clothing and how it moves when faced with a faceless model.’
The collections and presentations fractured the fashion world. They eschewed hypes and ignored the new line for every season cycle. Instead, items from previous collections were recycled as new ones. It felt like a conceptual artist was at work behind the scenes, one who was unmasking tailoring’s true craftsmanship, bringing worn and weathered beauty’s brute force to the catwalk...although it must be said that his shows were also a sharp critique of the ‘catwalk’ phenomenon. In an old car park, Margiela’s ‘cats’ would mingle with the public or show up in a working-class neighbourhood, sometimes carrying the neighbourhood kids on their shoulders or paling around with them amidst the cheerful crazy of it all. The models wore the now-iconic Tabi shoes, with soles and heels soaked in red paint so that it looked like the ‘cats’ had left trails of blood on their prowl. Hanging in the Paris studio was a motto that brought the term beauty down to earth:
‘Beauty’s quality can only be seen on certain occasions; in other words, those occasions crucially define its quality.’
In the Martin Margiela documentary, Margiela said the following on the subject: ‘Women can walk around in fishing boots, but they’re still as beautiful as ever because they remain who they are.’
Margiela left Maison Martin Margiela in 2008 to devote his time to visual art – a world always happening in the wings. He won the Belgian Fashion Award in 2018 but failed to collect it in person. Instead, he wrote a letter that, among others, clarified why he had abandoned the fashion world.
‘This is a magnificent tribute to a period of hard work and commitment that began early and lasted over 30 years until 2008. That was the year I understood I couldn’t handle the mounting pressure and increasingly higher demands of the trade worldwide. I also deplored social media’s overdose of information, which destroyed the “thrill of anticipation” and neutralised any element of surprise, which was absolutely fundamental to my work.’
He started taking painting classes in 2000, where he learned how to reproduce old masterpieces and observe all the technical stages of the old masters. One of his creations included a triptych on wooden panels with a hyper-realistic depiction of a beard dye product’s packaging.
By then, some of his non-fashion-related art had already surfaced, e.g. a high heel painted black on the back of a slender photo model on a Clarins beauty brand billboard. The brand’s motto could be read as a statement: ‘faire plus, faire mieux et aimer le faire.’ [Do more, do better, and enjoy doing so.]
It resembles the image of the retrospective exhibition (2021-2022) at the Parisian Lafayette Anticipations gallery: a giant deodorant stick. The object symbolises our obsession with hygiene and the need to control every possible kind of change that might pose an existential threat. The label’s ingredients and instructions have been erased and replaced with practical facts about the exhibition. People would enter the exhibition through the emergency exit. In an email to The New York Times, Margiela talked about how other mediums constantly consumed his time and attention. This was his first retrospective after bidding the fashion world adieu.
‘Fashion captured my imagination early on in life, and I developed my vision by presenting it as conceptually as possible. But I needed to explore other mediums to enjoy sheer, boundless creativity.’
That said, visual art was always somewhere, lurking behind one door or another at Maison Martin Margiela. The iconic Tabi shoes mentioned earlier are one such example. Inspired by Japanese sartorial tradition, these socks have a crease or notch that divides the big toe from the other toes. One version only features a sole and a heel. The foot would be attached to the shoe with transparent tape, creating the illusion of a bare foot on a high heel. The plaster version on a pedestal is reminiscent of a broken statue’s foot from Antiquity or Rodin’s The Thinker. The term ‘wearable art’ fits the bill quite nicely here.
The art of draping has much in common with sculpting, which Margiela says is an incredibly slow, tedious process that must often be repeated until the drape of the fabric looks exquisite. He tries to get to the very bottom of his rational understanding of materials to draw upon the power of intuition, the mystical concept or desire for a potential transformation.
There’s the flesh-coloured bodysuit simulating nudity, intended to remind the audience that behind one layer of couture lies another. Skin colour is the invisible shade of the clothing. There’s also a sock sweater made of military socks. And there’s a necklace with a wine bottle cork.
Visual art harkens back to his Hasselt school days at Sint Lukas Academy (now PIKOH), where he discovered his latent talent and passion for drawing and sketching. In 1998, Mary Prigot’s obituary appeared in the newspaper with a portrait drawn and signed by Margiela. She was a Belgian artist who co-founded the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp’s fashion design and theatrical costuming departments.
Vanitas (2019) is a work comprising five silicone spheres of faux skin implanted with real hair. The colours of these ‘hairballs’ range from a child’s blond to the worn white [RDG(1] of an elderly person. The work is a ‘sculpted’, abstract portrait of a woman showing traces of the passage of time. The spheres are arranged side by side according to the stages of life she passed through in her ageing. The pieces feel almost illusory. It creates the impression that this is an anatomical object for producing hallucinogenic fever dreams. The form erases every reference point – no left or right, no bottom or top, no front or back.
[RDG(1]This is actually a dingy grey: Martin Margiela | Vanitas (2019) | Artsy