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MARTIN MARGIELA: AN ARTIST DECONSTRUCTED IN NAME ONLY

by Harriet Walker

Some may blanch at an attempt to compare a fashion designer to the likes of Pythagoras, Michael Faraday or John Maynard Keynes; they may not be wrong to do so, but the intention here is not to protest that the complexities of a prom dress or a blazer are on a par with understanding triangles, electrical currents or the modern economic structure. It is merely to say that these men, in their ingenuity, wisdom and consideration, lent their names to what they did and changed the fields they worked in. Martin Margiela did that too, and at the expense of his own identity.

Known often as 'fashion's invisible man', Margiela is not a designer who takes a bow at the end of his shows. He doesn't give interviews, very rarely has his picture taken, and any correspondance that journalists or buyers enter into with his atelier is plurally signed 'Maison Martin Margiela.' In an industry which relies so heavily upon recognition, contacts and relevance, he is an anonymous anomaly, but to those who know fashion, his is practically a household name. In fact it is a household name, given that it now stands only for his work and his company.

He has many reasons for his intense privacy: firstly he aims, by suppressing himself, to focus attention on his designs, however confusing or outré they may be, which is why he also often sends models down the catwalk backwards or with their faces covered. In the current cult of celebrity designers this seems a watertight argument. Having gauged reaction to lines by Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham or the Olsen twins, who's to say whether consumers now buy pieces because they like them or because someone famous appears to like them?

That's not to reason, of course, that buying Margiela isn't buying into a movement, and this is the second reason for the designer's anonymity as well as his eponymity: you're being let in on a delicious private joke. Those who know Margiela's clothes know who wears Margiela's clothes – the only identity now left to this man comprises four diagonal white stitches, arranged in a square, on the back of a jumper, a dress or the outer side of a scarf. It's where the labels are sewn in, and it's the essence of Margiela's methodology: he's the anti-designer with an anti-designer label. Margiela perpetuates a system of inconspicuous consumption.

Margiela stores can be found in slightly weather-beaten, reclaimed buildings, far from the fashion streets of the world's style capitals. The company was bought by Diesel in 2002, and the London shop last year relocated to Bond Street, but the old one was in Bruton Place. The walls were white painted bricks. The products and displays were scarce and the tills were like supermarket check-outs with metal chutes which your sartorial alimentation slid down before being bagged up by one of the many lab coat-wearing assistants. It simultaneously took all the glamour out of buying designer clothes, whilst injecting the whole process with humour and quasi-ritualistic pomp. Entering any Margiela store worldwide is an experience rather than a shopping trip. Likewise, wearing Margiela is so much more than quickly trying something on. There are often dozens of sleeves to negotiate, for a start, or you find that a jumper is supposed to worn with the neck around your hips perhaps, or the lining becomes a Mobius strip of silk and is somehow also the outer layer too. Such geometry requires more than a changing room, more than a mirror, more than one pair of hands (which is perhaps why there are so many sleeves involved).

And this multifariousness is the third reason for Margiela's own reclusiveness. He insists that any collection of clothes is the product of a cohesive team of designers, not just the one with the recognisable name, the deepest tan and the brightest smile. He has invested his identity into his brand whilst removing himself from the spotlight, which he in turn shines upon others who work for him. Margiela's methods of working and hyping himself as a concept whilst resolutely avoiding the ensuing recognition recall the work of that other great Creator, the one who left Adam and Eve in the garden without any clothes on. “We appropriate, we do some vintage,” said arch-designer and fashion demi-god Azzedine Alaia. “Individual vision no longer exists. Margiela is the last one.”

Margiela took up the reins of conceptualist design where the Japanese avant-garde of the Eighties, like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, left off. Often described as a deconstructionist, many of his garments have visible external seams or unfinished hems. He is known for making couture pieces from unwanted detritus, or super-luxe dresses from the material that others normally use for linings. For his first collection in 1989, he made an evening gown from a leather butcher's apron; a frothy ballgown became a series of tailored jackets. His spring/summer 2009 collection – incidentally, a 'greatest hits' collection for his 20th anniversary, and his last before stepping down as head of design at the house – featured a coat made entirely from wigs, a medium he first worked with in 2005; spring/summer 2008 saw “ghosts of garments” in shredded denim pelmet-skirts and jeans more hole than trouser, and “vestigial accessories” were transplanted into the clothes themselves – a shoulder bag was stitched into the armpit of a dress, a purse onto the front of a skirt. The jutting padded shoulders that featured so prominently (no pun intended) in so many autumn/winter 09 collections were pioneered by Margiela for spring 2007.

His patterns are cut deftly but conspicuously, although the construction of his clothes is so complex as to deconstruct the very vision before you – a bodysuit made from strips of leather looks haphazard but is infinitessimally planned and the illusion of happenstance belies the detailed intention of it all. Pattern-cutting and the design process itself were writ large in the anniversary collection, where circular tops and jackets floated like vinyl records around the bodies of the models who wore them, and a denim 'jacket' was created by trompe l'oeil effect painted onto a square of material. His method owes as much to hyperbole as his identity does to litotes; he is a designer of extremes but a person of little substance. The Margiela aesthetic is, if anything, overly and overtly constructed in its deconstruction, as the subjugation of the designer's own self has also been.

Indeed, Margiela codifies his world to the tiniest degree. Those white tags which are now the public perception of his face are part of an intricate numerical system, three rows of ten numbers that are printed on each of his labels, and above his shops. His artisanal ranges, known as '0' and '0+10' for women and men respectively, have been part of his collection since autumn/winter 89 and are limited in quantity – this is in effect his couture line, handmade in his atelier. His ready-to-wear 'collection for women' is '1', the 'collection for men' is '10, and these pieces have rectangular blank tags inside them. Introduced in 1999, the menswear range is a sort of capsule, with each garment suitable to be worn with everything else in the line. '4' represents a 'wardrobe for women', designed with comfort in mind, while '14' is a 'wardrobe for men'. The intention with this range is to put timeless design into practice, so Margiela brings out a replica collection each season. '11' is a range of unisex accessories. '22' is footwear for men and women, which has spawned many a copy-cat cloven-hoofed 'tabi' boot or ankle-cuff sandal. MM6 is a diffusion ready-to-wear line for women, less avant-garde than '1'. '8' is eyewear, and '13' is a range of various other pieces, including pamphlets and magazines.

Such ordering calls to mind an inventory, but it's also part of a theorem. So perhaps it isn't so brazen to put Margiela alongside Faraday or Pythagoras. His integers add up to a modern lifestyle. True, Margiela doesn't make children's clothes (they'd be far too complicated for kids to get into and out of unaided anyway) or cars or dishwashers, but his code and his very artistry breaks down into a matrix for men and women. If, when Adam and Eve realised they were naked, they had made a list of what they needed, it might have looked something like a Margiela label.