The last time Maison Margiela held an “artisanal” show, the brand’s version of couture, it shook the fashion world. That was back in January 2024. John Galliano was creative director, and his theatrical vision of smoke-filled cafes and nighttime assignations had attendees swooning in delight and shrieking genius.
So it was pretty audacious, all things considered, for Glenn Martens, the new designer of the brand, to decide that his first coed show — and the first Margiela show of any kind since Mr. Galliano’s — should also be couture.
Good thing it offered some genius of its own.
An exhilarating, multidimensional, occasionally misguided explosion of ideas, it was the most propulsive show of the week; a scream of originality amid collections and designer debuts that have largely offered well-calibrated wearability. It was extreme in its imagination and technique (sometimes too much so), but never namby-pamby. It’s what fashion needs.
Even if it did not begin well.
Held in the same underground warren of concrete rooms where Martin Margiela, the founder, had staged his last show in 2008, it began, in fact, with two women in transparent plastic dresses. Their hands were trapped at the waist beneath their pencil skirts, their faces encased in plastic masks.
Masks were a Margiela signature — he thought they served to focus attention on the clothes — but here the models looked as though they were suffocating. It was painful to see, and seemed even more painful to wear, whether or not it was conscious commentary on the state of women in the world.
Just as the outrage was beginning to bubble up, however, out came a figure in a sweeping, mud-color cloak, with the inside of the hood and its matching mask covered in dark crystals. That was followed by a series of three gowns in bronze, gold and silver made from aged duchesse satin that swirled around the bodies like storm clouds, and it was clear we were in a whole different universe. From there, things just got wilder.
Patchwork skirts and jackets that suggested elaborate ruined wallpaper, or pages from a diary, were peeling back at the seams. Flowers sprouted up out of prints like still lifes run amok. One dress made from more than 10,000 pieces of gold costume jewels looked as though a giant magnet had walked into a pawn shop. A skirt seemed composed of an entire flock of pigeons that had collided midflight. T-shirts were speckled with crystal shards, as if they had clawed their way out of the center of the earth.
Imagine the weather gods had come down to Earth during medieval times, started collecting both heraldic tapestries and Flemish flower paintings, and then marauded their way across the centuries to join Hell’s Angels for the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is how they might look. History was layered on top of texture on top of reference; preciousness rooted in the memories each piece seemed to contain. Rather than, say, the number of bugle beads.
It was couture, but not as it has existed anywhere else. Except maybe in the archives of Margiela, where value always rested in the potential of found objects. And it was spectacular.
Mostly.
A series of gowns in flesh-tone jersey so thin as to expose the corset and bones beneath simply transformed the wearers into skeletal wraiths, while wire belts with corseted backs seemed more like garrotes for the waist. And it was impossible to look at the masks that accompanied every look — in hammered metal or gleaming crystal, no matter — and not think of the way masks are being used around the world.
As with the state of women, facial coverings have taken on a complicated political meaning in the present day, and no matter how fantastical fashion may be, it is not exempt from the shadow of current events. Ultimately, choosing to obscure the models’ faces detracted from the humanity that otherwise permeated the clothes.
Like the masks or hate them, however, like the feral, unbridled nature of the collection itself, it was impossible not to react to them. Which, given how dulled everyone’s senses have become by the never-ending stream of imagery in which we all exist, is Mr. Martens’ magic.
At the end of the show, guests were ushered upstairs for a celebration, where waiters holding Champagne-filled trays lined the way to a room full of multicolored balloons piled neck-deep. Jaded fashion editors waded in, laughing in their stilettos. That was magic too.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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