No Front Row at Margiela

The children got the best seats, which is still the cleanest way to understand Martin Margiela's Spring/Summer 1990 show. Not the clothes first, not the myth of the invisible designer, not the later museum language around deconstruction. Start with the seating. Local children in a Paris playground, watching fashion people arrive somewhere that had not been arranged for them.

The show was for the third collection of a house that was still barely formed. Palais Galliera describes the setting as a derelict Parisian wasteland, with models walking among neighbourhood children in raw hems, deconstructed garments, and repurposed items turned into clothes or accessories. A later runway account places it in the 20th arrondissement, in a North African neighbourhood playground, with an uneven dirt-and-rock surface instead of the ceremonial strip of carpet the industry knew how to read.

That surface matters. A polished runway teaches everyone where to look and who matters. Editors sit where their authority can be photographed. Buyers are placed according to rank. The designer appears at the end, usually for the small ritual of applause and confirmation. Margiela pulled at all of that without giving a speech about it. Put the audience on rough ground, let the children sit where the front row should be, and the hierarchy starts looking less natural than it did ten minutes earlier.

I wrote recently about the Tabi boot, and the playground feels like the next move in the same argument. The boot made authorship visible from the ground up. The playground made the fashion system visible by refusing to build its usual room around it. Both gestures were theatrical, of course. Anti-spectacle is still a kind of spectacle when people have come to watch. However, the difference is that Margiela's theatre kept pushing attention away from polish and back toward circumstance.

The clothes did not become secondary, exactly. They became less obedient. Fifty-nine looks, according to the runway account, moved through a place that would not flatter them automatically. Raw hems and reused fabric can look precious inside a gallery-white fashion space, where every fray reads as a curatorial decision. On dirt, near children, with the show partly slipping out of control, they looked closer to an actual proposition about use, damage, and the social life of clothes.

There is a danger in making this too saintly. Fashion loves a rebellion once it has aged into archive material. The same gesture that first unsettled the room can become a handsome wall text later. Palais Galliera now has the language to hold it: deconstructed garments, challenged fashion aesthetics, visible construction. Vogue, writing about the Galliera exhibition, places his disused car parks, abandoned metro stations, and derelict supermarkets inside the long story of designers taking audiences out of their comfort zones.

All true, but the playground still resists being tidied away. What I like about it is the logistical awkwardness. The dust. The children not behaving like trained extras. The fact that fashion people had to stand around in a place that belonged to someone else. There is more actual critique in that than in most manifestos, because it changes the body before it changes the argument. You can't believe in the sanctity of your assigned seat if there isn't one.

Margiela's best early work often has that quality: a simple displacement that does more damage than a grand refusal. Take away the label. Refuse the usual designer performance. Show the clothes where the audience has to negotiate the ground. After a while the system starts revealing how many of its customs were only customs. A front row is not a law of nature. It is furniture with an ideology.

Sources:

Martin Margiela 1989-2009 The Women's Collections — Palais Galliera

A Maison Martin Margiela Exhibit at the Palais Galliera Proves Martin Did It First — Vogue

Review the Runway: Maison Margiela's 1990 Spring/Summer Show — Review the Runway