With a design team in place at Maison Martin Margiela and owned by denim mogul Renzo Rosso, the label is no longer the industry’s left-field voice. However the team persists to draw on the originator’s rich heritage and diction and offer their own version of MMM’s DNA.
Designing garments characterised by an appreciation of imperfection, personality and eccentricity, Masion Margiela’s groundbreaking artisan aesthetic still informs the new collections for men by providing modern, wearable and covetable clothes.
Martin Margiela himself was always fascinated with the colour white describing it as a lifestyle - and it's never about white but whites. It was a reaction against black and the power-look as his goal wanted to move away from it, and it soon become the brand’s signature which defined the environment in which they worked and the keynote of all the Margiela spaces, offices, showrooms and shops, around the world.
For summer 2013 a live band amped up the atmosphere to what kicked off a strong collection, which although creative, focused on basic utilitarian garments. White was core and its influence provided chunky corduroy suits that opened the show to the slick suiting that followed.
The original Margiela was always ahead of the game when it came to up cycling. The process of his Artisanal collection was a form of recycling as dead stock was used to transform used objects or garments to make new ones. This season can ring pulls; souvenir patches and shredded leather strips were utislied to form new garments.
While the original Martin Margiela chose to subvert his presentations by representing them on tube platforms and street corners, this show was housed in the swanky Hotel de Rothschild – how times have changed - as does the label which now has global reach and must appeal to the wider market.