On Sunday 15th July, along with the celebration of France’s triumph at the World Cup, a much less publicised event took place in Paris — the closure of Margiela / Galliera, 1989-2009, Palais Galliera’s immense Martin Margiela show. The exhibition — captured here exclusively for SLEEK by filmmaker Laure Atanasyan — presented the most comprehensive retrospective of the Belgian designer’s work to date. With more than 130 pieces on view, it followed Margiela’s oeuvre from his first collection, shown in 1988 in Marais, to his very last day at the namesake brand.
Margiela left his Maison on the evening after the Spring/Summer 2009 show, exactly 20 years after the brand was founded. Now, a decade after his departure, Margiela’s ideas remain as relevant as ever, while his designs prove a constant source of inspiration for other fashion designers.
“He is worshipped almost religiously,” says Alexandre Samson, the curator of the exhibition. “There are people who would eagerly carve his name into their skin.” For Samson, however, the goal was to use the exhibition as an opportunity to tell a story that would “inspire even those who have little to do with the world of fashion.” In the end, the barely advertised show was visited by more than 80,000 people — a figure that must reassure the curator that he more than succeeded in his task.
Samson and Olivier Saillard ‚ the then-director of the museum — first contacted Martin Margiela in the summer of 2016 with their proposal for an exhibition. Shortly afterwards, they received a “yes”. In the following two years, Samson spent “hours and hours talking to the designer” and many days chasing down his vintage pieces. As well as drawing from the huge collection of Margiela designs belonging to the Galliera archive, the show featured loans from 27 collectors. “Convincing them to loan pieces wasn’t always easy,” remembers Samson. “There’s always a lot of drama and a lot of emotion attached to Margiela’s work.” This air of theatricality occasionally extended to Samson’s hunt for the treasured pieces too: “Once, on my way to see a collector, I found myself close to Verona during a tremendous storm with thunderbolts flashing,” he laughs.
"There’s always a lot of drama and a lot of emotion attached to Margiela’s work."
But the most extraordinary thing that happened to Samson while preparing for the show was meeting the elusive designer himself. “Though I’ve always been a fan of his work, I’ve never been a fan of his. Still, on the day when I was supposed to meet him for the first time, I felt like an excited six-year-old with shaky knees,” he says. Paradoxically, for someone so notoriously enigmatic and anonymous, Samson found Margiela to be “very open and very much present”. “It‘s almost as though this anonymity allows him to remain sincere, open and approachable,” the curator reflects.
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about the exhibition at Galliera was that it managed to convey not only the intellectual aspect of Maison Martin Margiela but also the emotional one. From the recordings of the early ‘90s shows and the graffiti-covered Tabi boots to the careful descriptions and the installations staged by Margiela himself, the show demonstrated how bold, fresh, inventive and humorous Margiela’s work was, as well as its fearlessly unorthodox position among the high-voltage glamour of the ’90s and ’00s.
“Martin Margiela’s approach has always been very avant-garde. Very arty in a way,” says Samson. “He actually told me that when he was a student at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, the teachers initially advised him to study art. But he didn’t want to, he just wanted to make clothes.”
Some of Margiela’s most audacious, “arty” pieces were on view, too. The SS90 paper vest made from advertisements found on the Paris subway, for instance, and the renowned pieces from his long-running “Replica” project, whereby the designer painstakingly recreated garments from the past with a quirky thoroughness. Of course, the obvious hits were there as well – the Stockmann collection from 1997; the oversized pieces from 2000; the wig coats – but the retrospective also shed light on the lesser known facets of Margiela’s career. His preoccupation with reinterpreting Edwardian and Victorian motifs, for example, evidenced throughout his early 90s collections — think: the deconstructed corsets he produced in 1991 or his cloaks of 1993.
Though Margiela himself hails from Belgium, it feels natural that this retrospective was held in Paris. The brand’s history echoes throughout the city, from the 18th Arrondissement where its all-white headquarters were located, to the many unique spots that have played host to Margiela’s shows. For examples, look no further than the show held on the outskirts of Paris, with children running among the models; the mysteriously beautiful, candle-lit show inside the deserted Saint-Martin subway station; the show at the Montmartre cemetery and, of course the designer’s very first runway display — held at a small theatre on Rue du Temple in Marais.
It also seems right that the retrospective took place at the Palais Galliera, where a young Martin Margiela (anonymously, of course) would spend hours perusing the museum’s celebrated collection. Galliera was also the first museum to display Margiela’s work — in 1991 — and the first to start acquiring his works as part of their archive. The way the exhibition was curated was Margiela-esque, too, Samson notes with a chuckle — with hardly any financial support, the museum, had to be inventive. “Margiela was very good at improvising,” he tells us. “At one of his early shows, when he had no accessories, he ran a white ribbon through the models’ fingers. The ribbon looked like a knuckleduster.” And don’t forget Margiela’s fabled repainting of the same shoes for several seasons because producing new ones would be too expensive.
Today’s Maison Margiela (the “Martin” was omitted several seasons ago) has little to do with the raw creativity of the early days. After Margiela sold his brand to the OTB group in 2003, it was forced to take a more commercial attitude. According to some sources, the reason Margiela left was because OTB wanted to re-brand the cult fashion house’s products, as well as launching new lines and increasing advertising. “Or maybe he felt he didn’t have much to say in the era of social networks,” proffers Samson. In any case, what is certain is that when Margiela departed from his eponymous house, it marked the end of a fashion epoch: an epoch where fashion was more about clothes than “likes” on Instagram; an era of independent brands and fashion shows with free seating. At a time when Margiela’s work is so frequently imitated, his retrospective came as an important reminder: contemporary fashion has to produce its own definition of originality, or risk becoming nothing but a wasteful industry.