Martin Margiela: Re-visiting The Hermès Years

Martin Margiela, the Belgian designer whose spare and conceptual aesthetic is being re-viewed and re-visited by a new fashion generation, will be the subject of an exhibition in his birth country.

The MoMu museum in Antwerp will concentrate on a rich but often neglected period: “The Hermès Years”. The clothes created from 1997–2003 by Margiela for the traditional Parisian fashion house will go on display together for the first time as a fashion entity. The show, marking two decades since the unexpected collaboration between the French haute luxury house and the inventor of recycling as a fashion format, will be staged from 31 March until 27 August 2017 at the Belgian fashion museum.

The late Jean-Louis Dumas, head of the Hermès family and CEO of the company, surprised the fashion world by picking in Margiela a designer whose iconoclastic vision might have been seen as the absolute opposite of a brand whose roots were in leather saddles and accoutrements for the upper-class horsey set.

By contrast, Margiela was a thoughtful innovator who appeared to deplore the excess of the 1980s and focused on deconstruction and renovation of existing clothing. Some of his most famous statements were to hold a Martin Margiela show on a bleak wasteland at the outskirts of Paris, to dispense with the usual hierarchical seating plan and to present the – in fact, rather pretty – collection inside plastic dry-cleaning bags. Another show was staged inside a genuine Salvation Army store with guests perched on old furniture amid racks of second-hand clothes.

But the brilliance of the head of Hermès was in appreciating that behind Margiela's iconoclastic approach was a deep understanding and love of tailoring, a knowledge of fabric and its tactile appeal and, above all, a modern attitude.

While the co-stars of the 1990s were Tom Ford at Gucci with his high-gloss sexy approach and Miuccia Prada with her ugly-intellectual aesthetic, Margiela produced for Hermès clothes that were elegant in an edgy way, making a clear statement about a masculine aesthetic but using tactile fabrics for a feminine allure.

In the 12 collections he produced over that period, the Margiela/Hermès collaboration had a nobility that was a powerful antidote and even a steadying hand alongside the extremities of fashion in the new millennium.

Since no one has previously considered this Hermès period as an entity and looked at it rigorously in relation to Margiela's work under his own label, the MoMu exhibition promises to be an intriguing exercise in curatorship.
        
And the fact that Margiela's influence is a powerful component today of the Vetements brand and its attitude makes this upcoming exhibition especially relevant.