Our 1990s nostalgia continues apace here at Vogue.com. Today it’s focused on Martin Margiela, the sui generis Belgian designer who did things his way and then walked away. That was years ago, and today John Galliano is ably heading up the label, but Margiela’s influence is as pervasive as ever. To see it, you need only look at the collections of Phoebe Philo’s Céline, J.W.Anderson, and, most of all, Vetements’s Demna Gvasalia, who worked at Maison Margiela after the founder’s departure.
Often mistakenly described as one of the Antwerp Six, Margiela worked for Jean Paul Gaultier before going solo in 1988. He didn’t give interviews or sit for portraits and became known as “the Greta Garbo of fashion.” As for his clothes, Margiela’s exposed seams and exaggerated shoulder pads, his upcycling of everything from plastic shopping bags to furniture, seemed to express the sense many had at the time that “the fashion system of design and manufacture itself [was] under fire.” Sound familiar?
Margiela is remembered as one of fashion’s leading deconstructionists, or what the French called “la mode Destroy.” If that sounds negative, Margiela’s work, like his shows, was about positive energy. Sure, he took things apart, but he put them back together, too, and seemed to have fun doing so. He played with fashion, enlarging doll’s clothes to adult proportions, printing sequins trompe l’oeil–style on dresses, and transforming traditional leather goods into witty clothes. By turning things inside out, Margiela turned the fashion world upside down and, somehow, set it right.
Here, from our archives, 14 runway outings from the groundbreaking designer.