After 12 years out of the general public eye, the reclusive clothier Martin Margiela has introduced his comeback – as an artist.
The Belgian, who retired from trend design in 2009, is to exhibit on the Lafayette Anticipations gallery in Paris.
The exhibition, merely referred to as Martin Margiela, will open on 15 April and have a group of his sculptures, pictures and installations, all beforehand unseen in public.
“This exhibition celebrates the idea that Martin Margiela has always been an artist, whose work has played out since, within and outside the art world,” the gallery stated in an announcement. “[He] has always made us look at things with fresh eyes. Going against the grain he cultivated an obsession for discreet people, abandoned objects and forgotten places and events, bestowing on them a new dignity.”
A mannequin wears a creation from Maison Martin Margiela’s autumn/winter 2008 assortment. Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/EPA
Margiela graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1979 and labored for Jean Paul Gaultier between 1984 and 1987 earlier than launching his Maison Martin Margiela trend firm (now recognized as Maison Margiela).
The trademark Margiela designs have been postmodern and anti-trend. He would take aside beforehand worn garments and put them again collectively once more through methods such as bleaching and slashing. He would depart uncovered threads and linings in his designs, underlining the position of the atelier within the manufacturing course of. His trademark merchandise, the “wig jacket”, was a excessive-trend instance of this kind of revolutionary DIY deconstructionism: a rendering of a fur jacket achieved with brown acrylic hair that took 51 hours to sew collectively.
“He invented conceptual fine art fashion,” stated Prof Angela McRobbie of the University of London, who added that his affect may very well be seen at the moment in designers together with Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia and Hussein Chalayan.
Margiela himself was an enigma. Running his label in sharp distinction to the massive-title designers of the time who traded on their model title and picture, he insisted that no pictures have been taken of him, interviews weren’t performed face to face and he did no finish-of-catwalk-present bows. In 2011, he informed the Independent, through fax, “we prefer to focus on the clothes and not all that is put around them in the media”.
His flagship retailer in Brussels was painted solely white and one among his emblems was an nameless white label stitched into his garments. “He refused the lure of superstardom, remaining largely invisible,” McRobbie stated.
Maison Martin Margiela’s spring/summer season 2006 present in Paris in 2005. The designer give up the label in 2009. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty Images
After 41 runway reveals between 1989 and 2009 he introduced his retirement. “He was sick of the system of having to do so many collections a year,” Reiner Holzemer, the director of the documentary Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, informed the Guardian final yr. “After he left, he suffered physically and it took him a year to recover from the stress.” Holzemer stated the designer put it into his contract that he would by no means be seen on digital camera.
“That he has managed to keep working in the way he has is testimony to his anti-commercial ethos and to his vision as an artist,” stated McRobbie.
