For a man so press shy and unwilling to give interviews, the exhibition almost felt like Margiela's way to bring relevance to a period of his career that he perhaps feels has been lost in time. It's a reminder that although the industry can sometimes make you feels like you're running a marathon in Tabi boots that are a half size too small with trend-driven change, ever-shortening lead times and difficult to please people on your heels – change is inevitable. That said, we shouldn't let ourselves forget what brought fashion to where it is now so it was nice to have a little reminder from Debo and the MoMu team; “We can’t go back to the ’90s.
It’s not nostalgia, because the world has changed. Fashion has a very short memory, and at times that’s very problematic. As a museum, we can give fashion its memory back.”.
Download Margiela: The Hermes Years Kaat Debo Ebook 1. Download Margiela: The Hermes Years Kaat Debo Ebook 2. Book details Author: Kaat Debo Pages: 256 pages Publisher: Lannoo 2017-04-14 Language: English ISBN-10: ISBN-13: 608.
Equally unpredictable – as far as first impressions go, at least – was the choice of a designer who was very much perceived as central to fashion’s avant-garde. Martin Margiela re-worked vintage finds – from leather butcher’s aprons to antique wedding dresses – based clothing around Stockman dummies, home furnishings and even Christmas tinsel. He turned more conventional fashion upside-down and inside-out – often literally – reversing seams and leaving edges to fray.
He favoured everyday materials – paper, calico, cheap lining fabrics – and cast beautiful friends and acquaintances as opposed to professional models for his shows, which took place in far-flung places with no seating plan (or at times, even seats). The Maison Martin Margiela label, meanwhile – a blank, white cotton square – seemed to question the very notion of designer fashion as status driven. To the uninitiated, there was no way of knowing that a Maison Martin Margiela design was, in fact, ‘designer’.