“To do a present after John [Galliano] isn’t simple, we’re all working very laborious,” Renzo Rosso stated earlier than Glenn Martens’ debut at Maison Margiela on Wednesday night time.
This Artisanal present got here roughly 18 months after Galliano’s triumphant swan tune and tilted the Paris home in a darkish, daring and DIY route, with among the garments wanting like that they had been buried for a while, the vintage wallpaper florals light, dirty and crackled.
Face coverings have been an invention of founder Martin Margiela, a conceptual designer with Greta Garbo-like methods who lined fashions’ faces partly to maintain consideration centered on the garments.
Right here they have been usually distracting and typically disquieting, particularly the suffocating plastic masks that opened the show, and the metallic ones almost encasing some heads.
Martens introduced the style flock approach, approach out to the Le Centquatre, a hangar-sized cultural house within the nineteenth arrondissement the place Martin Margiela, unknown to all however Rosso and his inside circle that night time in March 2009, staged his final present, a hail of gold confetti in the course of the finale ostensibly to have a good time his twentieth anniversary, but additionally silently signaling the tip of an period.
Utilizing the subterranean house 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 picket chairs have been set.
To Martens’ credit score, his coed couture seems 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 unfastened 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 environment of Flanders and the Netherlands, his prints of flowers and recreation primarily based on Seventeenth-century still-life work, after which given a 3D facet 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 would possibly 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 trend 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 automobile and R&D heart for the home since its creation in 1989, shall be supplied on the market, and potential purchasers have been current on the present.
