“To do a present after John [Galliano] will not be simple, we’re all working very laborious,” Renzo Rosso mentioned earlier than Glenn Martens’ debut at Maison Margiela on Wednesday evening.
This Artisanal present got here roughly 18 months after Galliano’s triumphant swan music and tilted the Paris home in a darkish, daring and DIY course, with a number of the garments trying like they’d been buried for a while, the vintage wallpaper florals pale, dirty and crackled.
Face coverings have been an invention of founder Martin Margiela, a conceptual designer with Greta Garbo-like methods who coated fashions’ faces partly to maintain consideration targeted on the garments.
Right here they have been typically distracting and typically disquieting, particularly the suffocating plastic masks that opened the show, and the steel ones practically encasing some heads.
Martens introduced the style flock method, method out to the Le Centquatre, a hangar-sized cultural area within the nineteenth arrondissement the place Martin Margiela, unknown to all however Rosso and his inside circle that evening in March 2009, staged his final present, a hail of gold confetti throughout the finale ostensibly to have a good time his twentieth anniversary, but in addition silently signaling the top of an period.
Utilizing the subterranean area of this huge venue felt very Margiela, the partitions flyposted with photocopied parts of inside structure, the flooring a papier-mâché of checkerboard patterns, upon which mismatched wood chairs have been set.
To Martens’ credit score, his coed couture seems to be like nothing else paraded in Paris this week with its weathered patinas and its use of offbeat supplies like clear plastic for trenchcoats, or oil paint utilized to males’s denims, freezing a free belt in a dangle.
The present notes clarified that repurposed supplies included lining materials, classic leather-based jackets and discarded costume jewellery, the latter looped collectively to create a shift gown that felt half flapper, half Missoni. It was kinda cool.
The Bruge-born designer referenced the medieval structure and ambiance of Flanders and the Netherlands, his prints of flowers and recreation primarily based on Seventeenth-century still-life work, after which given a 3D side by overlaying phantasm tulle over particulars just like the wings of the hunted birds.
One gown in mother-of-pearl duchess satin recalled the eerie statue on the duvet of the 1987 Useless Can Dance album “Throughout the Realm of a Dying Solar,” the top of the wearer draped in mourning. Others using much more voluminous draping in metallic duchess have been merely otherworldly — otherwise you may say very Cardi B, who has been out-couture-ing everybody in Paris this week.
Additionally to Martens’ credit score, this debut effort duly honors the home’s legacy of provocative, avant-garde fashions whereas additionally sticking an unwashed thumb within the eye of the numbing quiet luxurious juggernaut.
The attention will take time to regulate to those typically messy, typically spooky garments, however the shock of the brand new is what drives vogue ahead.
Right here’s one thing else new at Maison Margiela. Gaetano Sciuto, chief government of the home, advised WWD earlier than the present that the Artisanal assortment, principally a picture car and R&D middle for the home since its creation in 1989, might be provided on the market, and potential purchasers have been current on the present.
