July 10, 2025 |
It’s July, and that means yet another fashion month is coming to an end. And the fash pack? We’re frazzled and flagging, ready to throw in our silk Hermés scarves and declare defeat under a pile of lookbooks and blister plasters. At this point, our hair is so crispy from hotel blow dryers and sweaty after-parties in tiny Parisian clubs and our skin feels like it might just fall right off if we glob on any more foundation; the only thing that might salvage our dignity is a Maison Margiela mask, obscuring our exhausted faces in a haze of high fashion. Because who better to help us hide our post-runway circuit shame from the haters than the most elusive maison in the fashion sphere. Iconoclastic, enigmatic, uncompromising, Maison Margiela is a house of myth, and since its start, masks have been a house signature. Just take it from Glenn Martens’ debut Artisanal show for the house.
Taking place in a poster-peppered industrial basement on the edge of Paris, models walked with faces obscured by soldered metals, thick tulle, mirrored shards, feather overlays and intricate crystal embellishments. Martens tapped into the maison’s archives, echoing Martin’s early use of distortion and concealment, but updated it with a post-apocalyptic romance – one that seemed almost to mourn the clarity of identity itself. This was hardly new territory for Margiela. In the maison’s very first years, masks were already pivotal. The spring/summer 1989 Artisanal show, held in a derelict playground in Paris’ 20th arrondissement, remains a benchmark for radical fashion. Models (most famously freelance dancers, street-cast rather than traditional agency faces) stomped through gravel and cracked concrete with faces obscured by sheer hosiery and strips of cloth tied haphazardly around their heads. The effect was unsettling, somewhere between tribal ritual and dystopian theatre. It was also a subtle critique of the rising supermodel phenomenon – Margiela made it clear that his clothes were the stars, not the people wearing them.
Throughout the 1990s, Martin – Belgian by birth and a graduate of Antwerp’s famed Royal Academy – doubled down on anonymity. His runway shows often featured models with gauze-wrapped faces or custom knits pulled tight over heads, sometimes even marked only by number tags, reinforcing the anti-personal ethos.
Perhaps, in a way, Martens’ interpretation acts as a sly nod to the fact that the founder himself remains a faceless patron saint of fashion anonymity. His ceaseless celebration of anonymity – reluctant to speak to press or be photographed, giving interviews only via fax or through his team, and still having never revealed his own face (the 2019 documentary Martin Margiela: In His Own Words was the first on-the-record account of his career, but still didn’t show the designer’s likeness) – cemented Margiela as an industry ghost long before the era of digital avatars and curated online personas. This total erasure of the designer’s ego was so complete that to this day, the only existing images of him are grainy, uncredited candids.
This practice didn’t just stay on the runway. It trickled outward into pop culture and streetwear. Margiela’s “facelessness” prefigured the masked antics of musicians like Daft Punk and MF Doom, and also foreshadowed fashion’s later obsession with anonymity – think Demna’s balaclavas at Balenciaga or Vetements’ street-cast models with faces hidden by oversized hoods.
When Monsieur Margiela quietly exited in 2009, the house entered into a period of interim studio-led collections that secretly saw Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy as part of the design team that collaborated with Kanye West on the uncanny prosthetic masks worn throughout his Yeezus era.
Then, in 2014 John Galliano took up the reins to offer something completely new, all the while honouring his predecessor’s mystique and conceptual daring. In Galliano’s hand, the masks returned in ever more elaborate forms. Shows featured ribbed or polka-dotted sheer face coverings, studded leather face harnesses, beekeeping veils, black masks embellished with trompe-l’œil eyes and crystal-encrusted masks that seemed to shatter the boundary between human and sculpture.
There’s no argument to the fact, then, that Glenn Martens’ Margiela is a cathedral of masks, a refuge for the self-conscious, the performative and the proudly weird. Tulle, metal, latex, leather, it’s got ’em all. Oh, but where to wear them? Having a bad hair day? Slip on a plastic head wrap that looks like it’s been made out of a garment bag and call it editorial. Major breakout? A feathered chiffon covering is your dermatologist-approved plan B for when the face card declines. Perhaps you’re into something a little seeder and have spent your evening scrolling through Grindr in search of anonymous thrills; Margiela’s distressed leather face masks are practically made for it. Cruising never looked so cool.
The list goes on. Dodging the speed traps on your Lime bike while you jet to the office – fashionably late of course? A Margiela mask is basically GDPR with Swarovski crystals – haute-camouflage for the surveillance age. Need a stylish alternative to the sterile medical masks of COVID-19? Trade polypropylene for organza – Margiela’s take on PPE is more poetic than public health. You don’t have to worry about an awkward run in with the ex either when you look more like an eerie, faceless entity than a scorned lover. And that walk of shame after an ill-advised afterparty rendezvous? Say au revoir, pull on a crystal visor, hold your head high and let the glitter catch the sunrise while you drift home incognito.
For the die-hard fash pack, there’s also the undeniable benefit of masking your way past clipboard-wielding PR girls at fashion week. Just don a Margiela face piece, give them a cryptic nod and slip through the velvet rope like you’re meant to be there – because in the world of Margiela, it’s never entirely clear who anyone is anyway.
So here’s to Maison Margiela: a house that built a religion out of concealment, turned masks into mirrors of our own projections and proved – long before Instagram filters or avatar influencers – that sometimes the most profound way to express yourself is to cover up entirely. After all, mystery, as Margiela has taught us for nearly four decades, never goes out of style.
Photography courtesy of Maison Margiela.
