January 25, 2018 |
Welcome to Maison Margiela’s distorted wonder-club-land. We in da club this morning. Disorder. Urban chaos. Nothing is what it seems. But then it never has been at Margiela. Twenty years ago, men in white lab coats held up Martin Margiela’s collection on coat hangers. So simple but fabulous. Twenty years on women purposefully charged into this world, an extra terrestrial kind of living room. American installation artist Jessi Reaves had been commissioned by John Galliano to add a disordered structure as a foil for all this quintessential pandemonium. Discordant furniture, chopped up, rearranged, an “unfinished symphony,” as Galliano called it.
But there is a harmony in all this. We want all that metallic rainbow sheen strobing-under-the-lights-stuff in our lives. We did say we were in the club. Razor sharp knife pleats came to life and plastic trench coats added protection. And then there were sporty modern geisha’s in sneakers, holding iridescent parasols. An etching of femininity in the bras worn war-like on the outside. Inside out, upside down as Margiela has always done it. But wait. Here we must note the black pant suit, the tiny hint of a fashion moment; Martin Margiela’s spirit fused with Galliano’s tailoring. Deep breaths. A remix of Lana Del Rey’s Blue Velvet, got inside our heads, hypnotic. We told you nothing is what it seems. Fantasy challenged reality with textures, prints, layers, puffer jackets morphed into dresses. As Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t…You see?” We see. We saw. We like a challenge.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
