MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA ( 20) The exhibition celebrates 20 years (already?) in fashion at MOMU museum in Antwerp now through February 2009. This unique show is curated by Bob Verhelst (once part of the Margiela fashion house) and highlights the incognito Belgian designer’s conceptual genius and master tailoring. The exhibit explores various themes used throughout Martin Margiela‘s career as a designer, as well as fashion shows, store & office designs, house style and communications policy. Exclusively for this event, Margiela will have limited-edition items on sale at the Fashion Museum reception.

MMM Background: “In 1988, after graduating from the fashion department of the Antwerp Academy and working as an assistant for Jean-Paul Gaultier, Martin Margiela and Jenny Meirens established Maison Martin Margiela. Their first pioneering fashion show followed in October of that same year. Margiela’s was a radically new visual language, with a silhouette – long, with strikingly narrow shoulders – that diametrically opposed the power dressing of the 1980s. He furthermore declines public appearances. Early in his career, Margiela emphatically decided to let his fashion speak for itself. All interviews are consistently given in the name of the Maison as a whole and no photographs of the designer are distributed – a sharp reaction against the star status that dominated the fashion scene of the 1980s and 1990s.

Maison Martin Margiela is especially known for its deconstructivist approach and its use of second-hand materials or materials with low commercial value. Margiela shows the inside of a clothing item, exposes its construction and focuses on that which fashion anxiously tries to conceal. Unravelling the grammar of clothing, Maison Martin Margiela reveals the strategies of the fashion system as he constructs something radically new. The working method produces an analysis of the system that underlies fashion and is followed through in the many varied aspects of the fashion house.”

MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA EXHIBIT
Sep 12 ’08 – Feb. 8 ’09
Tue. – Sun. 10am-6pm

MOMU – Fashion Museum of Antwerp
Nationalestraat 28, 2000 Antwerp
Tel: +32 (0)3 470 27 70
Fax: +32 (0)3 470 27 71
www.momu.be