100 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Martin Margiela

A documentary called We Margiela comes out in October 2017, with premieres at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Rotterdam arts center LantarenVenster, the Antwerp fashion museum MoMu, and 10 Corso Como in Milan. Jenny Meirens and the original Maison Martin Margiela creative team gave interviews for it. Martin Margiela himself, as ever, does not appear. About 80% of the facts in this piece come from the book MARGIELA: THE HERMÈS YEARS.

Martin Margiela is a fashion designer. He founded Maison Martin Margiela, now called Maison Margiela.

He has never given a face-to-face interview and is rarely photographed, which earned him the nickname "the invisible designer."

In the famous group portrait of the century's fashion designers — Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Michael Kors, Valentino and the rest — the empty space in the bottom left corner was Martin Margiela's.

In the 1980s and '90s, as fashion turned itself into entertainment, that was hard to understand.

Some people even assumed Martin Margiela was a marketing concept and that no such person existed.

The mystery made people curious, though some magazines refused to cover him because he wouldn't meet their editors.

Even so, plenty of people had met him, especially boutique owners and fashion editors. Many said they had seen him sitting in the audience at his own shows.

By their accounts, Margiela was tall and handsome in the conventional way. In winter he often wore a tight black sweater; in summer, a T-shirt with Levi's jeans, and a dark hat pulled down over his eyes.

He is Belgian, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and from 1985 to 1987 spent three years as an assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier.

When Margiela was a student in Antwerp, the mood at the school was very punk.

The year Margiela decided to leave and start a label of his own, Jean Paul Gaultier hated to lose him: he was the best assistant Gaultier had, and hugely gifted.

From 1997 to 2003, Margiela was creative director of womenswear at Hermès.

When Hermès picked him for the job, the whole fashion world was stunned.

One journalist wrote: "Jean-Louis Dumas [chairman of the Hermès group from 1978 to 2006] has bet on a wild horse off the prairie and tied this fashion empire to its hooves."

Margiela's avant-garde experiments and Hermès's image of traditional craftsmanship were near opposites.

People wondered whether he would cut a hole in a Birkin, or make a garment out of an Hermès print scarf.

When the invitation came, Margiela had doubts of his own. He was afraid he wouldn't have the time or the energy, and afraid of the uncertainty of stepping into a completely different world.

But Jean-Louis Dumas trusted him.

Dumas once told the Financial Times: "Only people who don't know Martin's work would find our choice unimaginable."

Dumas asked Margiela what he thought luxury was. "Luxury is quality, comfort and timelessness, one laid on top of the other," Margiela answered. Dumas thought so too.

The two were introduced by Dumas's daughter, Sandrine Dumas.

One day her father called and asked her to pick a name from a list of designers to succeed Claude Brouet, who at the time led a few designers working on Hermès womenswear ready-to-wear. Sandrine chose Margiela without hesitating.

Sandrine Dumas walked in Margiela's shows. She thought he looked at women calmly and clearly, unlike men whose eyes are full of sex.

Jean-Louis Dumas's son, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, admired Margiela too, and described him as oxygen: invisible, and absolutely necessary.

At Hermès, Margiela's designs were far more restrained. But the "wild horse" still changed two of the house's signature elements: the womenswear ready-to-wear logo and the jewelry clasp.

He found both too showy, out of keeping with the feeling he wanted to convey. Jean-Louis Dumas hesitated a long time, then agreed.

The ready-to-wear logo became a mark Margiela had found on a pair of 1970s vintage Hermès gloves: "Hermes Paris" in black on a brown label. For the clasp, he used an H-shaped stitch as the brand mark.

It took some work to get Hermès to accept that Margiela would not give interviews. Patrick Scallon, press officer at Maison Martin Margiela, was a great help.

A few interviews he could not escape. He answered them by fax, and he answered only as "we," never "I."

Before Hermès, Margiela had never used cashmere and knew little about it. It was too expensive.

He wanted to trade the grand fabric for the ones he liked — flannel, Shetland wool and camel hair — but the group thought flannel wasn't luxurious and the other two weren't comfortable. The two sides compromised: Margiela and the mill developed a cashmere that looked like flannel, Shetland wool and camel hair.

Jean-Louis Dumas kept asking Margiela to design one of Hermès's classic printed squares. Margiela was reluctant.

He did design a scarf in the end: a diamond-shaped silk scarf in a single color, with no print. Jean-Louis Dumas was unenthusiastic, and so were the master silk workers of Lyon.

In the end Dumas gave in. That scarf is still on sale at Hermès.

The Hermès Double Tour watch, whose strap goes twice around the wrist, was Margiela's invention too.

He also liked designing clothes that could be worn more than one way.

He designed a "tri-kini": a bikini with an extra, detachable piece of fabric, so you can decide whether to bare your waist.

Margiela disliked sketches and mood boards. He preferred to explain his ideas in words.

He prepared seven words to sum up what he wanted to do for Hermès, among them comfort, nonchalance and details.

At Hermès he did not begin, as other designers do, by going through the house archive. He wanted something original, something nobody had done.

When the first collection was ready, Margiela arranged a small presentation at the Hermès flagship on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, so the press could feel the clothes up close.

Because the clothes were so plain that the design was almost invisible.

Linda Loppa, Antwerp's godmother of fashion, saw that first collection at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré flagship and was too moved to breathe. Loppa bought a V-neck camel cashmere sweater. "Until I touched that collection that day, I didn't know fashion and art could express nothingness."

Véronique Nichanian, then Hermès's menswear creative director, bought a lot of Margiela's clothes. Nichanian felt elegant in them, in keeping with the idea of an independent, mature woman with a mind of her own.

Margiela has been out of fashion for nine years now, and people still talk about him.

Not one young designer has escaped his influence.

The two hottest designers in fashion today, Raf Simons and Demna Gvasalia, were both shaped by him.

So Kaat Debo, director of the fashion museum in Antwerp, Belgium, decided to mount a touring exhibition, MARGIELA: THE HERMÈS YEARS, to show people what remarkable things Margiela invented in his ten years as creative director at Hermès, before the internet age.

Margiela took part in it, supplying explanations of the concepts and related material.

Kaat has met him a few times. She found him a generous man with great respect for women.

Margiela's best years were the 1980s and '90s, before the internet was everywhere.

When MARGIELA: THE HERMÈS YEARS opened at the Antwerp museum, about half the magazines that interviewed Debo did not know who Margiela was.

Kaat also produced a book under the same title as the exhibition, and launched it not long ago at 10 Corso Como Shanghai's fourth-anniversary event; a good number of fashion design students turned up.

On the book's dedication page, Margiela wrote: for Jenny Meirens and Jean-Louis Dumas.

Jenny Meirens co-founded Maison Martin Margiela (now Maison Margiela) and ran the business side of the house.

Margiela once held a show in an empty parking lot. Just before it started, a building next door caught fire and the fire department ordered the show stopped. Jenny talked the firefighters round, and the show went on.

Jenny Meirens died of illness on July 1, 2017. Maison Margiela's official Instagram posted a picture of the two of them embracing, with no faces in it.

Jenny's daughter Sophie Pay walked in Margiela's shows. Sophie said that when Margiela picked out clothes for each model, he took her personality into account.

Margiela liked non-professional models: women between 18 and 60, from every kind of job.

Before going out, the models got a massage and a glass of champagne.

But he liked to cover their faces with veils, hair, greasepaint or masks.

Ask Carla, the founder of 10 Corso Como, about Martin Margiela and she can list one idea after another that stayed with her. "I can't stop myself buying Martin Margiela," she said. "It's incredibly comfortable to wear, and you don't have to put heels on with it."

Carla has collected a pile of Martin Margiela clothes and has staged many events about him. She often sighs that everything Martin Margiela did is now being copied. "I don't know what has happened to fashion," she said.

The first person to call Martin Margiela's work "deconstruction fashion" was Alison Gill, though the word "deconstruction" has never come out of Margiela's own mouth — or if it has, we wouldn't know.

At Martin Margiela's first show, in 1989, the models' soles were wet with red liquid, and they walked a runway laid with white cotton, leaving a bloodlike mark at every step.

The split-toe boots in that show are called Tabi, after the thick-soled Japanese sock that separates the big toe. Maison Margiela still sells them, and they still look avant-garde on the street.

The second show, in the autumn of 1989, was held in ruins outside Paris. Nobody blinks at that now; at the time, no one had ever seen a fashion show put on that way.

Among graffitied ruins and condemned buildings, the models did not walk smoothly, there were no assigned seats, and the front row was packed with excited local children. It was a chaotic performance in a state of "anarchy."

It was the first show Raf Simons ever went to, and he came uninvited. "I'd always thought fashion was a bit shallow, but that show turned my view upside down," Raf Simons said.

In 1992 Margiela showed a womenswear collection in Saint-Martin, a Paris metro station shut for years, covered in graffiti and said to be haunted; it opened again briefly and then closed.

Maggie Cheung walked in the Hermès Fall/Winter 1998 show that Margiela designed.

If you had lived in Paris in the 1980s or '90s, you might have run into him at a flea market.

He was obsessed with vintage clothing and reworked plenty of secondhand pieces into new designs.

On secondhand things he dug up at flea markets, he would put a label saying where they came from.

He designed a bag by wrapping a secondhand bag in white cotton cloth. He made a vest out of playing cards, a jacket out of scrap leather, a wallet out of old gloves.

During the war, Margiela's grandmother took a worn-out garment, split it in two, turned the lining out and sewed it back together into a new one. Margiela loved that story.

He loves that flawed beauty, and he has always gone after it. His clothes are often in a state of not being quite finished.

He tore the cloth cover off a dressmaker's dummy and made it into a vest, with the words "stockman" and "semi couture" still on it.

In his fourth season Margiela designed a sweater with a complicated knit, and no factory would make it, so in the end his mother and her friends did. Four seasons later Martin Margiela found an Italian factory willing to realize all his mad ideas.

Margiela made a down coat that swept the streets of New York and Paris: it looked like a duvet with two sleeves coming out of the middle. Faye Wong wore one.

Margiela edited the first issue of A magazine, where he taught readers to make a pullover out of eight pairs of cotton socks.

"Martin's clothes, unlike most clothes today, don't presuppose a social status. His open mind and his democratic spirit are addressed to every age, race, body and style, and that is what makes Margiela revolutionary," said Olivier Zahm, founder of the French fashion and culture magazine Purple.

Margiela has guarded his private life well, but we can know him through other people's eyes.

Margiela is most likely heterosexual. Marina Yee, one of the Antwerp Six, is rumored to have been his girlfriend; she later left fashion, unable to carry the weight of being famous, and broke up with him.

"Margiela was open to anything, but he also paid great attention to detail and knew what he wanted. His voice was smooth, with a strong sense of Zen about it, and it pulled the people around him together and fired them up," said Sibylle de Saint Phalle, who cast Margiela's Hermès shows in 2000.

Christian Blanckaert was CEO of Hermès Sellier, the house's leather goods arm, from 1996 to 2004. Christian passed customer feedback on to Margiela, who came to his office twice a year — often, by Margiela's standards.

Margiela would go through every detail of a collection with Christian, down to the smallest one, so that Christian could understand the logic behind it. "Martin was unexpectedly rational and extremely organized, like an engineer, not emotional at all," Christian said.

"He is a warm, sensitive person," said Stella Ishii, founder of The News showroom in Manhattan.

In 2002 Diesel's parent company, OTB Group, bought Maison Martin Margiela. In 2008 Martin Margiela announced he was leaving his own brand.

He did not say why, of course. Perhaps the marketing-led brand-building of Diesel's parent did not fit Martin Margiela's creative direction; perhaps he was simply tired and didn't want to play anymore.

Asked about Margiela's departure, OTB chairman Renzo Rosso said, "I can't imagine it. I love him."

Margiela had wanted Raf Simons as his successor, but Simons had just signed another three years with Jil Sander.

After Margiela left, the brand ran anonymously for a while.

The fashion columnist Suzy Menkes exposed the designer working behind the scenes, Matthieu Blazy, after the Spring/Summer 2015 show, and Blazy left MMM as a result.

Suzy Menkes wrote the foreword to the book MARGIELA: THE HERMÈS YEARS.

Maison Margiela is not so mysterious now: everyone knows its creative director is John Galliano.

From 1996 to 2011 Galliano was creative director of haute couture womenswear at Dior, a star designer of Margiela's generation, forced out of Dior over anti-Semitic remarks.

As for Martin Margiela himself, nobody knows what he is doing now.

Cover and in-text images from: The Fashion Law, Vogue, MARGIELA: THE HERMÈS YEARS, Another