Fashion Practice

The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry

ISSN: 1756-9370 (Print) 1756-9389 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rffp20

Exhibition Review: Maison Martin Margiela 20

Nicolas Cambridge

To cite this article: Nicolas Cambridge (2011) Exhibition Review: Maison Martin Margiela 20,
Fashion Practice, 3:1, 123-130

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175693811X12925927157171

Published online: 27 Apr 2015.

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Fashion Practice, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp. 123–130

DOI: 10.2752/175693811X12925927157171
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
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© 2011 Berg.
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Reviewed by Nicolas
Cambridge
Nicolas Cambridge studied fashion
design in the UK before moving
to Japan where he worked in the
fashion industry in a freelance
capacity. After returning to the UK
he completed a PhD at the London
College of Fashion, University of
the Arts London. He currently leads
a Masters program in Fashion
Technology at the British Institute of
Technology and e-Commerce.
cambridge@bite.ac.uk
Exhibition Review:
Maison Martin
Margiela 20
Somerset House, Embankment Galleries,
London, June 3–September 5, 2010
In the early 1980s, as the avant-garde outputs produced by Japanese
designers debuting at the Paris collections perturbed the sartorial estab-
lishment, a group of Belgian fashion students who would later also come
to prominence for their deconstructionist approaches were graduating
from the Royal Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts. Martin Margiela, a
contemporary of the so-called Antwerp Six, first worked freelance, then
as an assistant designer to Jean-Paul Gaultier before starting his own
label in 1988. This exhibition documenting his twenty-year career—one
 124 Exhibition Review

characterized by an uncompromising clarity of purpose—was located in

the Embankment Galleries at Somerset House, home to fine art founda-
tion the Courtauld Institute.
Visitors consulting the booklet that accompanied the show may have
felt, like the narrator in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius,” that they had chanced upon a discursively constituted
universe—not least because the event also involved “the conjunction
of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” Dictionary-style entries on the cover
of this information-rich document listed a number of “facts” about
the fashion house, while the myriad facets of mirror balls positioned
throughout the gallery seemed to reflect the problematic binaries of
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fragment–whole, illusion–reality, and surface–depth that the designer

interrogates through the medium of dress. An information poster rather
loftily claimed that no other fashion house had engaged to the same
extent with issues of history, craft, commerce, innovation, and author-
ship. One might question that statement—particularly in view of the
collaborations with craftsmen, use of “abject” materials,1 explorations
of novel modes of display and parsings of sartorial grammar undertaken
by several Japanese designers—but that Margiela’s career as a sartorial
pathologist conducting forensic dissections of the artifacts and conven-
tions of fashion is deserving of a major retrospective is unarguable.
The literature stressed that this exhibition was about more than just
the clothes—accordingly, garments were almost entirely absent from
the early sections, which concentrated on production, promotion, and
presentation. Scale models of previous incarnations of the show (in
Antwerp 2008 and Munich 2009) showed maze-like layouts with sight
lines blocked by screens printed with images of closed doors, uninhab-
ited stairwells and blank walls—fracturings of time and space on which
much of the designer’s work is predicated. An “absent presence” engi-
neered by ostentatiously stitching a blank label into each garment was
reiterated throughout—initially in the form of the company photograph
(minus the designer, so we were told). His team of accountants, mer-
chandisers, and assistants were thus recognized, but not recognizable
because they appeared only in numbered outline. A life-size wire-cut
polystyrene version of the image struck a rather duff note, as did the
giant white hand holding a list of the numbers given to each of the
Margiela lines and the transparent inflatable boot—both rather reminis-
cent of the guardian “balloon” that repeatedly foiled attempts at escape
from “The Village” by a man identified only as Number Six in kitschy
1960s television series The Prisoner.
A full set of invitations to the fashion shows included versions in-
scribed on a plate, in the form of an advertisement circled in a newspa-
per, as a piece of embroidery, a calendar, a box of confetti, a personal
letter, and, bafflingly, a handful of seeds (did they sprout into a deci-
pherable pattern?). All collectors’ items no doubt, but none quite reach-
ing the level of idiosyncrasy achieved by Nothing Nothing designer
 Exhibition Review 125

Julian Roberts, whose exquisitely crafted summonses were to nonexistent

events. Conversely, Margiela’s fashion shows are nothing if not events;
the large-screen video-recording of the “Birthday Show” documented
several shows that manipulated the dynamic between viewer and ob-
ject. The tactic of depersonalizing the models produced Surrealist-style
resonances—with faces obscured by forward-brushed hair they resem-
bled the René Magritte image, beneath featureless masks figures from a
Georgio de Chirico painting—and the ghost of Elsa Schiaparelli seemed
to linger throughout the exhibition. Margiela is renowned for spectacular
use of contingent spaces in the metropolis and, by intriguing coincidence,
his circus-style presentation was a format regularly used by 20112057—
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the cult Japanese brand whose designer has also insisted on painting ev-
erything white (including once, apparently, his apartment and its entire
contents).
Whereas the albino telephone box from which changing patterns
were projected onto a duvet coat could be considered as an example
of site-specific recuperation by the exhibition designer, the rationale for
parking a vintage caravan (also housing a video) outside the lower-level
entrance was less clear—ironic comment or hackneyed cliché regard-
ing the “British” way of life? From the main entrance on the Strand a
trail of shoe-prints resembling those made by Japanese tabi (soft cloth
boot) led down to the exhibition where the designer’s signature split-
toed footwear designs became rigid-looking, silver-chromed sculptures
à la Jeff Koons (background, Figure 1). A series of cut-off jackets of
stiffened white cotton seemed as inversions of the classical bust—each
disembodied form a step in a tailoring exercise that culminated in the
garment’s shoulder-line disappearing entirely. This section cleverly ar-
ticulated Margiela’s artist-cum-academician approach and hinted at
the riches waiting to be discovered on the upper floor. The mezzanine
gallery was disguised behind a large curtain printed with an image of
the space prior to installation of the exhibits; thus visitors had to pass
through what one might call (with apologies to physicists everywhere)
“Schrödinger’s Cat-flap”—an interface where the event hovered be-
tween states of existence and oblivion.
The next level offered more garments conjured into corporeal shapes,
here achieved through the application of paint while fitted on the body.
The depredations of time on these layers created something akin to the
patina that Grant McCracken has suggested was antithetical to the no-
tion of fashion in early consumer culture. Similarly, ideas of surface
were disrupted by a piece of knitwear that retained vestiges of its pack-
aging material and a pair of trousers made from silesia—a material
normally used only for pocket bags and waistband linings. This was one
of many examples made more meaningful by an awareness of the nuts-
and-bolts of the designer’s trade—fashion professionals would have had
a better appreciation of garments that appeared to be toiles marked
with construction lines, featured unnecessary seams or that ­appeared as
 126 Exhibition Review
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Figure 1
Ronald Stoops. Courtesy of Somerset House.
 Exhibition Review 127

serial variations on a canonical item (Figure 2). Knowledge of sartorial

inter-textuality was most useful when confronted with pieces seemingly
terminated at arbitrary points in the construction process, although a
suit jacket that dramatically emerged from the original bolt of fabric was
both really effective and effectively realized. These “incomplete” items
embodied a Derridean “un-decidability,” as did those drawing attention
to contrivances that the discipline of fashion design generally seeks to
hide.2 Indeed, these pieces had an uncanny presence as the cumulative ef-
fect of seeing external darts, facings and over-locked edges constructed a
subject position inside the garment—in effect, the clothes began to wear
the audience. Another unexpected side-effect occurred in the placing of
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a piece made by joining opposite halves of each of two bisected coats at

the edge of full-length mirror. Looking along the glass the viewer was
presented with an illusion of a single consistent piece—at the same time
becoming part of the spectacle and a reminder to other observers that
the human body is no more symmetrical than the garments that give it
full expression.

Figure 2
Ronald Stoops. Courtesy of Somerset House.
 128 Exhibition Review

The collection of flatten-able garments highlighted a structural

tension between their two-dimensional origin and three-dimensional
function, but possessed neither the geometric purity nor the aesthetic
qualities of Miyake’s “Pleats Please” project. Other Japanese designers,
notably Yohji Yamamoto and Jun Takahashi, have also made use of the
trompe l’oeil techniques that Margiela has mobilized so effectively—
the difference here was that, beneath fabrics embossed with images of
buttons or lapels, the genuine objects remained hidden and unusable.
Features that appeared to be collars, pockets or belts were, in fact, just
fabrications, and the light-reflecting function of sequins was so effec-
tively negated by firmly attached matt-colored versions that they ap-
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peared to be printed on the material. Predictably, the most rewarding

section was also the most frustrating. The “Artisan Collection” listed
the number of labor-intensive hours that had gone into the crafting of
wearable pieces from mirrored tiles, leather straps, socks, gloves, elastic
tape, strips of woven magazine paper, innumerable buttons arranged to
create an image pointillist-style, and, most strikingly, strings of hand-
dyed paper beads fashioned to resemble a fox-fur stole. The final item
constituted, perhaps, a two-pronged assault on the haute couture sector,
critiquing both exploitation of poorly-rewarded, skilled workers and
fetishization of “luxurious” materials. The chosen mode of display reit-
erated the limited availability characteristic of elite fashion as these cov-
etable items were illuminated for only short periods before becoming
invisible behind the semi-mirrored glass—leaving onlookers peering in
frustrated fashion at their own reflections like window-shoppers outside
designer stores at night.
A darkened “Birthday Room” offered respite from the unremitting
whiteness of the main spaces—an area where one could sit down and
watch recordings of shows or view stills of individual items. In the same
room life-size video projections of Margiela’s clients wearing their pur-
chases demonstrated the very wearable nature of some of his clothes.
Off to one side of this annex was a section on the boutiques which, we
were informed, eschew the naked commercialism of the fashion busi-
ness by being discreetly located in side-streets—something that is no
longer the case in London, at least, where the outlet is now sited in a
main thoroughfare alongside several other high-profile labels. Architec-
tural drawings, precise instructions regarding display cabinets, histories
of each building, and a collection of keys suggested a belief in the per-
sistence of cultural memories in the fabric of buildings and hinted at
levels of control approaching obsessional.3 In the room opposite was a
series of five outfits, all in a matt-black flocked material that, according
to the booklet, provided an “overview of the ‘evolution of the Maison
Martin Margiela silhouette.” Here, again, the prescriptive tone jarred—
rather than evolution one was left with a sense of random eclecticism as
outlines changed radically from Victorian to Sixties space-age. The final
“Doll’s Wardrobe” room housed replicas of outfits copied from toys
 Exhibition Review 129

that reproduced their disproportionately large fastenings—a creative

strategy also employed by Japanese brand Cosmic Wonder. In what ap-
peared to be an inspired mode of display—much more so than the simple
hanging of the garments high on a wall used for the previous pieces—
two jackets had been threaded through slots in life-size photographic im-
ages of the models (no doubt taken when wearing the actual garments)
in a manner that recalled the cut-out figures with wardrobes of tabbed
garments found in old comic books. However, these turned out to be part
of the collection of outsized garments that concluded the exhibition.
This fabulous show offered a relatively comprehensive (menswear
was very under-represented with many more images than garments;
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Figure 3), thoughtful and welcome celebration of one of fashion’s

maverick talents. Was anything missing? Well, Margiela himself, of
course ... appropriately enough, as the designer has now left the label.
This shock departure might have saved us all from a fate of being re-
duced to ciphers. Toward the end of his account, Borges’ narrator re-
veals that the region of Tlön is a fictional site found in the literature
of Uqbar on the planet Orbis Tertius—itself an illusory world written
into existence by a secret society of engineers, metaphysicians, painters,

Figure 3
Ronald Stoops. Courtesy of Somerset House.
 130 Exhibition Review

a­ lgebraists, ­biologists, and moralists. When the multi-volume encyclo-

pedia is published, Orbis Tertius’ imagined history takes the place of
our own—a scenario not dissimilar from the arcane, scientifically in-
formed construction of planet fashion authored by the Belgian designer
and his anonymous team. Tellingly, although a trail of footprints (their
resemblance to cloven hooves enhanced by the circular heel) led visitors
into the gallery, there were none returning—an indication, perhaps, that
for those ensnared in the labyrinthine coils of Margiela’s sartorial uni-
verse there was never any chance of escape.
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Notes

1. Following Caroline Evans’ (1998) use of the term for materials con-
sidered as having low exchange value within the fashion system.
2. See Gill (1998) for a discussion of Derrida and the manner in which
“traces” referencing traditional tailoring and dress-making practices
undercut claims by fashion to be an innovative discipline.
3.  Cf. Samuel (1994).

References

Evans, C. 1998. “The Golden Dustman: A Critical Evaluation of the

Work of Martin Margiela and a Review of Martin Margiela: Exhibi-
tion (9/14/1615).” Fashion Theory 2(1): 73–94.
Gill, A. 1998. “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished,
Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes.” Fashion Theory 2(1):
25–50.
Samuel, R. 1994. Theatres of Memory, Vol.1. London: Verso.