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# Archives # Spring-Summer 2006 - Maison Martin Margiela Womenswear collection.

Throughout the years, Maison Martin Margiela has reflected and played with traces of time.

For Spring-Summer 2006, the main theme of the Maison Martin Margiela Womenswear collection was ‘Dissolving’. Colourful ice cube jewellery melted with time from body heat, staining the clothing in the process.

MMM and Beauty - Vanessa Beecroft 

Beauty comes with the threat of its end - the tacit knowledge that it won’t last forever. We have a problem with this, and we get caught, in the illusion of never-ending beauty.

MM is candid about beauty. Its beauty comes with faults, burns, rips, memories of the past, dreams, tragedy. This beauty is surreal, asymmetrical, has no gender, no status. It is not sexist, is not luxury, is not money, is not class. It’s white, it’s black, and it’s a “Replica,” not a false interpretation.

When we own MM, we attach something that looks as if it has already undergone life and lost those elements tat induce the illusion of the everlasting. This garment is conceptually permanent because its temporary quality is part of its look.  It is a picture of life after the act, even before it happened.  What moves me is that this fear, or burn, or misfit feels unique, as if it were custom-made for me.

I own a pink MMM skirt that is beautifully made and is scorched on the bottom, which ensures that it cannot be flawed. The skirt also defies convention: a madame would never wear a dress of her own that is ripped. In Southern Sudan, people wear clothes that are “formal” (that charities provide.) These clothes endure a lot, and the Sudanese wear them until they fall apart. Margiela dresses the first-world with first-world quality, but third-world mentality.

Some MMM pieces embody the worst fears a person could have about vulnerability. Like everything we are afraid to lose, MMM clothes are vulnerable. Yet, because they appear as if they have already been violated, the fear that we might destroy or lose them is exorcized.

“Replicas” are a reminder that the beauty of the past is permanent.  This beauty is as valid today as it was before. It is not created by constant change or a quest of newness but by recontextualizing classic elements in our time.

Margiela’s idea of beauty is not aprioristic or ideal. It does not depend on the individual who made the clothing or on the mystification of a model (the models’ faces are often covered). The work is done by a team that re-forms classic pieces, or deconstructs new garments, restricting them with a revolutionary point of view. 

When you wear MMM, you become part of a resistance to the vulgarization of costume, the branding, the opulence, the ignorance of the new rich. MMM avoids celebration, buckles, gold and logos but conveys humor, substance, new ideas, abstraction, social provocation, happiness and beauty. 

By referring to classic bourgeois clothes that are altered, turned inside out or upside down, MMM forbids the reification of ideals by embedding them in their ghosts. The ghost is our grandmother’s closet. But once we wear it ripped, out of size, or out of gender, we give these faults meaning that create a fundament for the new. It allows u tot connect to our roots without being conservative.

True beauty is bare. It does not create false promises of eternity but shows us that it is ephemeral. We fall in love with its imperfections and fragility, realizing that beauty is the experience of the beautiful and not an opaque object. When beauty is true and not perfect or ideal, it can be anything and last forever.

Anna-Nicole Ziesche, States of Mind and Dress, 2002. 

The fashion film States of Mind and Dress (2002) by Anna-Nicole Ziesche (b. 1972, Hamburg, Germany) opens with a shot of a naked man and woman standing with their backs to each other and with their arms in the air. A blue, hand-knitted sweater gradually grows on the body of the man and a green pair of jeans on the body of the woman. As soon as both garments are finished they glide back and forth from the one body to the other via the raised arms and over the heads of the man and woman. An exchange of garments between two bodies is thus created.

Ziesche’s aim with this film is to show that you can have just as intimate and complex a relationship with someone else’s clothes as with the other person him- or herself. States of Mind and Dress is an example of Ziesche’s later work, which focuses on the ambivalent relationship an individual has with his or her body and clothing. The film addresses how an individual’s personality can be expressed by means of the clothes one uses to dress one’s body.

Ziesche trained as a fashion designer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. In her final year, however, she decided that she did not want to design actual clothing but devote herself to fashion photography and to making fashion films, installations and performances in order to express her ideas about contemporary fashion. The clothing that Ziesche designs only functions, then, within her performances and films. This conceptual approach, which she herself calls ‘fashion practice’, is a new way of creating a visual context for fashion. Ziesche’s work thus occupies a place between fashion and visual art.

Walter Van Beirendonck autumn—winter 1993—94.

Dries Van Noten spring—summer 1999.

It is unusual for a designer to be famed for his men’s and women’s collections alike, but Dries Van Noten is just that. His designs take all types of men and women into account. Be they tall or short, plump or slender, they will find something to their liking in his designs. He succeeds in making suits for men who don’t want to wear suits, and dresses for women who don’t like wearing dresses. He seduces them with his choice of fabrics and his tailoring. Fabrics and colours are very important for Dries Van Noten, who grew up in the world of textiles — at the age of sixteen he was already purchasing fabrics for his father’s clothing store. His fabrics are usually dyed and prewashed specially for him. He uses natural materials like silk and wool; he prefers fabric that doesn’t look too new; it should feel soft and look as if it has already been worn, as if the garments has been ‘broken in’. He experiments with textiles: obvious materials are replaced by something more transparent, heavier or lighter. Subtlety lies in the way the fabrics are used, one layer superimposed on another, and the combination of different materials.

Het Modepaleis, Dries Van Noten’s Antwerp flagship-store. (left: Van Noten or ‘Het Meuleken’, the store that belonged to his parents)

Middle: Window shopping at Geert Bruloot’s boutique Louis, Antwerp

Dirk Van Saene autumn—winter 1990—91.

He graduated from the Academy of Antwerp in 1981 and intrepidly opened his own boutique Beauties & Heroes, where he sold his own creations, until he snapped up almost all the prizes at the Golden Spindle contest. The next year, as one of the ‘Antwerp Six’, he proceeded to the British Designer Show in London, and in 1989 took part in their collective show. Later, in 1990-1991, they shared their showroom presentation in Paris. In March 1990 he organized his first show in Paris with the Dirk Van Saene collection.

As a radical aesthete, he is one of the rare designers who ‘attacks’ fashion strictly from tailoring, developing it into a profusion and rapid succession of consequences. One collection may hold a range of ideas which would suffice an entire design career — as he says himself, he gives it everything. Consequently he is sometimes called a man of more than nine lives, capricious, elusive…