Martin Margiela has always been so tricky to write about. He’s been endlessly analyzed and labeled as conceptual, deconstructionist, minimalist, a master of reappropriation and upcyling. Fine, fine, fine—though none of it ever rang quite true to me. Years ago, I decided that the only solution was to surrender and just describe why I loved his clothes.
From the late ’90s to 2008, I was almost completely Margiela dependent. I lived in my amassed Margiela wardrobe almost every day and every evening I had to go out. I had the excellent black tuxedo shoulders from Spring 2007, a collection of subliminally surreal bags and sparkly jewelry, things that had been converted from ordinary objects, the brilliantly chosen “Replicas” of a boy’s blazer and a draped goddess dress from the ’70s. I had trousers and frill-fronted dress shirts from the men’s side, even. The Replica trainers, countless T-shirts. I like to think it all looked like anonymous clothing—well, other than the four white stitches in the back of the neck, which were the giveaway to fellow initiates—but at the same time, I have never had a period when I felt more me. It was almost a physical blow when the man who hid behind Maison Martin Margiela walked off into the sunset after his 20th anniversary show in September 2008.
After his disappearance (it was never announced, but immediately palpable in the collections) and that of Helmut Lang—my other passion, who quit his own label in 2005—there seemed to be nowhere else to go for the likes of me, part of a generation who’d grown up in what I can only call the laid-back, reserved, elegant street-chic of the ’90s. Of course, then, the opposite had to happen, as it always must. Years of dressy fashion were to follow. Cocktail dresses and blogger clothes. Bare-naked clothes. Everything just the absolute antithesis of made for us.
Céline made it easier—respite for the fashion disenfranchised. (Phoebe Philo’s first collection, with its beige bodies and black leather shoulder patches, blew a faint MMM dog whistle for all the despairing.) Still, in my heart, I had reconciled myself to the fact that the entire code of dressing, thinking, and being that emanated from Martin Margiela had passed. It was dead. It was gone.
But I was wrong! All I can say from my personal and utterly selfish point of view is that my Margielas are back out again—because the vast influence of the invisible Martin is again sweeping through fashion. To what can I put this down? Fashion history never quite repeats itself the same way twice, but a sea change has come, far out in the oceans where women’s and girls’ instincts and sense of practicality eventually cause a swell that becomes a wave. It is telling us that too many frilly dressing-up things have clogged up the system, and now there are people of a new generation who are coming in to replace the street-chic values Margiela left behind.
While Maison Margiela, as it’s now called, is being creatively led by John Galliano and made over in his own style, it’s been down to Demna Gvasalia, his brother Guram, and the Vetements collective to bring back the old Martin Margiela ethos full force. Gvasalia worked at MMM after Martin the man left. The choice of name—Vetements translates as “clothes”—is true to the utilitarian drive that was always there behind Margiela’s work, as is the method of showing on street-cast models in non-posh, urban venues.
Some people have carped that Vetements is a “copy”—but I would judge it on a different scale: its relevance to what people really want. Timing in fashion is all—and you have to be able to feel when it’s right. For a small independent company, demand for Vetements’s oversize jackets (yes, Margiela did this in 2000) went off the scale, snagging the brand 44 stockists and a super-quick sell-through. The chopped-up flower-printed tea dresses with sweatshirting inserts are already down in fashion’s street style annals as a phenomenon of the year.
It’s not just Vetements I see channeling the spirit of Margiela, either. Whether consciously or not, it’s there in the ripped and shredded denims and general elegant decay of Marques ‘ Almeida’s collections—a line that is also a commercial hit because of its essentially no-nonsense sensibility. I see it, in fact, in the whole swing of the mood toward more casual dressing: a market readjustment, a class-action memo to designers that actually, we need clothes, remember!
See 14 vintage Martin Margiela shows.
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