Remembered: The Game-Changing M artin Margiela Show of 1989

As talk turns towards a future of consumer-facing fashion shows, we look back on the 1989 Martin Margiela presentation, which set a new paradigm for the fashion show as a public spectacle, in an oral history with contributions from Margiela’s closest collaborators and biggest supporters of the time.

text / article Spring/Summer 2016 issue of The Gentlewoman

PARIS, France — In the autumn of 1989, on a derelict playground in the outskirts of Paris, Martin Margiela staged a show like nothing the fashion world had ever seen: the seating plan was first come, first served; the front row was filled with local kids; the models were stumbling; the runway was uneven. The critics loathed it. The industry loved it.

The show took place on a playground in a North African neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. Martin wanted the children to stay around the area. So the creative team consisting out of Jenny, Pierre and Martin decided that the kids could make the invitation.

Martin hated pretty printed invitations with calligraphy. Since we were staging the show on a kids’ playground, we thought it would be an idea to have the invitations drawn by kids, so it was like they were inviting you to their place. The next thing, then, was where do we find 500 kids to draw all these invitations? So we cut rectangular pieces of cardboard, gave them to the local schools, and in their art classes they were given the theme of a fashion show, and they drew their interpretations.

In early forms of theatre and performance, the performer was leaving aside his previous identity, turning into the interpreted character. The face is one of the most important parts of a human being, and, as it has been said, the eyes are a gate towards the human soul – therefore, by hiding them, as Margiela did, he was trying to make a statement with a lot of symbolic depth left for us to decode.

It was almost an iconoclastic approach to fashion as he was deliberately covering ame way Orthodox believers used to erase the saints’ faces from the religious icons, as an attack on the established convictions or institutions. And Margiela did reject the constructed meanings in this sense, using the human face as a carta bianca, a tabula rasa on which he could recreate and give a new set of meanings to reflect upon. A mask can narrate a different story than a face does; there is a sense of power and mystery and an introspective value for both the wearer and his audience. On one hand, it is difficult for the public to integrate it in a specific context but it also gives them the imaginary experience of recreating a new identity, as models are on equal level of anonymity behind their masks: strong and mysterious due to their undisclosed traits, yet vulnerable to be consumed by the observer without being able to give a look back at the camera, at the photographer, at the public.

By this practice, Margiela seems to invite us to see ourselves from all the possible perspectives, to have a wider yet closer examination of the things that we normally take for granted and to analyze the strangeness that lies at the foundation of our normality. His aesthetic is based on a congruent relationship between surface and depth, raising a whole cult of invisibility through an “absence equals presence” type of approach. For him, style and substance are cohesive elements, you cannot separate one from the other, as the surface of things gives us enjoyment, yet the interior is the one that gives life. Margiela was coagulating these visionary ideas at a time when the idea of the invisible icon did not exist. Like many things in life, designing fashion is not for everyone, it should be for a restricted circle of literate people that know how to stretch our minds to new ideas and make us live them so deeply.

‘Our fashion was probably intellectual sometimes and we hope it was always intelligent. When one designs clothes, one is automatically a fashion designer, but sometimes this can or should simply be called clothing designer. Our benchmarks are more the evolution of our own creative expressions.” to Martin-Margiela-wherever-you-are.