As deeply conceived as it was exquisitely surfaced, this Maison Margiela show under the hand of Glenn Martens was close to being a masterpiece. And I only say ‘close to’ because; a) to insist that a collection built on upending the notion of perfection is near-perfect must be wrong, and b) Martens and the Margiela studio seem to be just getting into their stride: much more is to come.
Tonight, we were in a Shanghai container yard. Like every ‘destination’ show, this first-ever Maison Margiela runway outside of Paris was driven by expansion, in this case to preface a four-city tour of four exhibitions dedicated to decoding some core lore—including the much-misunderstood masks—in China. Unusually, though, tonight the destination’s dislocation served the collection. We were surrounded by towers of containers, red, blue, and green, stamped with the names of their operating companies and clients: I saw a lot of Temu. This critical artery of trade for the planet’s greatest exporter beat sweetly against the thrifted provenance of much of the collection: free market to flea market.
Martens and the studio started this collection, which included ready-to-wear and the Artisnal offering, by returning to the process often observed by Martin Margiela: creative upcycling. The first Margiela exhibition, which opens here tomorrow, includes 58 archival looks variously fashioned from wigs, combs, playing cards, and much more thrifted ephemera. Fall 2026’s thrifting started with a group of 19th century porcelain dolls. As well as sparking the straightforward China association, these translated into an incredible 90 kilo dress fashioned from a shattered mosaic of porcelain; its hem splintered and shrieked as it was worn across the rough cement floor. They further inspired the first three odd-numbered looks in which eight layers or so of glassy organza were printed and painted and layered and draped and molded over skirts to create eye-defyingly immersive visual surfaces. These were worn under masks shrouded just enough to reveal the printed, vacant moue of dollface makeup beneath.
Once the porcelain had cracked out of view we saw a series of evening looks presented as skin-like surfaces, with jersey stretched and bonded over the guts of tailored garments so tightly that you saw the outline of the suiting architecture beneath. This was later returned to in a series of leather looks, jackets, pants, and dresses, in which the constructed edges of the garment were left unfinished like rawhide. Martens and the studio then applied the Margelian Bianchetto treatment to garments including an inwardly draped silk gown, tailcoats and pants, and an argyle overprinted mohair skirt suit. The bodice and arms of a quite amazing Edwardian-referencing school ma’am gown were molded in latex-blended white paint, so that the Bianchetto surface of the garment was also its substance: this demanded that its model keep her arms crossed in prim admonishment at all times. Another puckered-surface paint-dress was surfaced with gold leaf to create a garment that was both rich and ravaged.
A few dresses from the 1870s that the studio found in its tour of Paris’s flea markets were drenched in beeswax as if trapped in amber, before being hung and left to drip as they hardened. Not unlike the porcelain dress, these were stressed by the wearing they received on the runway, and left trails of cracked wax behind them. Some more 19th century dresses, long preserved but rendered desperately delicate by time, were mounted on fabric and then removed to leave their imprints on ‘new’ dresses: tattered into matter. Upcycled metal wires, vintage velvets, fringed blankets, furniture jacquards, and brittle tapestries were all refashioned into furniture for the human form.
The draping, very Martens-ian, was wonderful. Complexly whipped and whorled, it surged around the body in turmoils like visible emotional weather events: these were charted in reams of taffeta in matte cream or shiny lavender, as well as the metal wires. Less intricate but still impactful were the tailored looks overlayered with silk and lace that created a sleek collision of gender categorizations, and the gowns in faded florals into which were sliced creamy scars of pleating.
The masks might look unsettling; the original point of them was to divert attention away from the person towards the garments being worn, but today many observers seem to find that this Margelian withholding of identity is somehow offensive by proxy. On the ground, however, the most challenging aspect of this collection was when heelless shoe and floor length hem sometimes disagreed with that rough cement floor. No wobble, however, ever quite led to collapse. In an era of globalization and standardization in which identity is commodified as data, this Maison Margiela was fiercely resistant, spiritually elusive, and beautifully imperfect.