In September 2008, Maison Martin Margiela's celebrated its 20th anniversary with a fashion show. It was a glorious moment with a rapturous audience cheering and clapping.
The event closed with a monumental soft fabric cake, Margiela's models hiding under it, his team, in their trademark white coats, walked behind the cake. Yet all the joy of that moment was tarnished by an announcement: that same evening, the elusive Belgian designer decided to leave the fashion industry and retire. Reiner Holzemer's "Martin Margiela: In His Own Words" opens with this event.
The peculiarity of this full-length documentary is the fact that we can actually hear Margiela speak in it while the director frames with the camera the designer's hands at work or opening boxes from his archive to reveal the research process behind his collections, showing mementos and inspirations.
Hands are an important element in this story because they are the only part of the designer's body we are allowed to see, but also because, when a few models are interviewed about Margiela, they talk about being dressed by him and feeling his hands had the delicate touch of somebody who cared, and who treated them like human beings and not like dummies or inanimate objects.
The director immediately introduces us to Margiela's semantics. The designer speaks about the importance of the white colour in his world, of the pristine Haute Couture coats donned by his team, the iconic label with the four stitches and the birth of the famous split-toed Tabi boots (inspired by trip to Japan that eventually prompted him to think about a soft Tabi shoe on a high heel).
Margiela's design principles - his passion for putting emphasis on the shoulder area and the shoes, as the former give attitude, while the latter guarantee the wearer a certain movement - are also presented together with the concept behind one key element of Margiela's vocabulary - the veiled face. A surreal element right from the beginning, the veil allowed Margiela to temporarily erase the face of his models to reshift the attention on his designs and on how they moved on the body.
At the same time the covered face also hints at a choice Margiela made pretty soon in his life as a designer – anonymity.
Indeed Margiela never showed his face in public, refused to do interviews and to take post-show bows (in the history of fashion there are a few humble designers who declined to partake in the classic final acclamation at the end of a runway, among them Italian Cinzia Ruggeri), but, as he explains right at the beginning of the documentary, there is a specific reason for doing so.
"I don't like the idea of being a celebrity, anonymity is very important to me it balances me that I am like everybody else," Margiela states while he turns a simple champagne cork stopper into a chic pendant. "I've always wanted to have my name linked to the product I created, not to the face I have."
While Margiela seems to regret at times this choice, he emphasises in the documentary that anonymity was a way to protect himself and produce more, and to ensure that people focused on the collections when they saw them rather than on the face of their designer.
Martin Margiela then tells his story chronologically: from the early days when he developed the label with Jenny Meirens in 1987, to the first show in a theatre in 1988 and the Spring/Summer 90 show that changed everything in fashion.
This runway took place in a derelict playground in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. The local residents sat among the audience and their kids ran alongside the models. Margiela himself remembers it as the most magical runway in his career.
There are actually other sweet moments in the documentary, mainly from Margiela's childhood: the designer remembers being spellbound when he saw on TV a fashion show by Courrèges that featured his cut-out go-go boots and gave a makeover to his Barbie doll's boots, recounts about asking his grandmother (whose fabric leftover he also employed for his fashion figures as a young boy) to replicate a Cardin dress for his doll and shows us the first jacket he made for a Barbie doll, that looks like one of his trademark designs from later years.
Fashion students will find it inspiring to see how some of the projects Margiela created at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp led to some of his key designs: a top made with kitchen towels was indeed the starting point for the iconic sock sweater.
But there are further genius-like moments to explore such as the collection of vintage clothes photographed and then printed on fabrics, jewellery made with coloured ice that melted on the garmets staining them, and the Stockman Collection (S/S 97). The latter was inspired by Haute Couture ateliers, but, unpleased with the final results Margiela was getting while experimenting around this theme, he decided to use the work-in-progress studies rather than the actual results.
It is even more interesting to see how some of the ideas he launched in his collections have become part of the modern fashion glossary: incorporating vintage garments in new designs (an experimental exercise that led him to his cut open evening dresses), repurposing and upcycling specific materials (think about his broken plates waistcoat or his plastic grocery bag and gloves tops, but also theatre costumes deconstructed and recombined into new designs) and creating oversized silhouettes.
Margiela has been a pioneer also when it came to streetcasting and holding his shows in unlikely places such as a parking lot with models moving in a neutral space with no designated seats (seats were assigned on a first come first served basis...).
Yet, the designer wasn't always understood: fashion critic Cathy Horyn (who appears in the documentary with former Margiela mentor Jean-Paul Gaultier, trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort and fashion historian Olivier Saillard among the others) admits that, like many other journalists, when Margiela presented his first collection for Hermès, she understood she was seeing beautifully cut clothes, but didn't actually get his minimalist chic approach and luxurious simplicity.
Yet it is exactly this approach that has become the successful recipe of quite a few brands catering for professional women looking for smart and elegant yet pratical clothes.
Towards the end of the documentary Margiela speaks about his company being acquired by Italian OTB. The arrival of Renzo Rosso in Margiela's life marked financial stability, but a loss of direction and the clashing with a new and faster fashion scene.
Feeling that, from designer, he had become a creative director, and unable to reconcile his role with the new needs of fashion and in particular with the fact that the minute the collection was out it had to go immediately on the Internet, Margiela decided to leave the house he had created.
In the documentary he acknowledges he had one main regret - not being able to say goodbye and thank you to his team, as the new owner wanted to avoid a shock. So, in a way this film is a love letter by Margiela to his team, a way to say a gentle thank you and goodbye after all these years.
But it is also more than that: the director asks Margiela if he feels he has told everything he wanted to tell in fashion. And the answer leaves a lot of possibilities open. Will Margiela be back one day? Is there a story that could be told in future with him as the main protagonist? Or will we ever see the paintings, sculptures and designs he's been creating without the stressful deadlines of seasons?
Destined to become part of the reference filmography of every fashion student who wants to enter the system, but also preserve their mental sanity and integrity (together with Wim Wenders' film about Yohji Yamamoto Notebook on Clothes and Cities), in the current Coronavirus emergency crisis "Martin Margiela: In His Own Words" assumes a new meaning.
The documentary reshifts indeed our collective attention on what is genuine design (think about the Tabi boots that are still produced today or the irresistible simplicity of the champagne cork stopper turned pendant - these examples fall into the "design" category rather than into the "volative trends" bin) reminding us that real fashion is unforgettable yet simple magic, like kids running alongside models during a catwalk show.
Martin Margiela: In His Own Words is now available on digital platforms.
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