You’ll get not much explanation—and certainly not for quoting—from the men and women in white coats who maintain Maison Margiela as to why they do what they do. So today we were left to consider the shift in format from runway show to static presentation and draw our own conclusions. To a soundtrack of Kerouac’s urgent bourbon drawl and the honeyed strangeness of Nico, two of the three rooms were inhabited by models in repose. In one, they sat on a scattering of low chairs, facing the crowd, sometimes chatting. One model read a fine 1958 paperback edition of Henri Bergson’s first doctoral wrangling with the concept of free will and subjectivity within the strictures of time, duration, and space while wearing a long-jacketed peak-lapel Prince of Wales check suit with no shirt, inserted frayed cuffs, a neck chain, and some orange-striped white tube socks. Another mixed an attractive white sweater with strands of wool fringing from the brown and scarlet stripes at its sleeve atop a diagonally striped shirt and split-hem striped white pants. His conversation partner wore a mighty shearling, the chap alongside him, red leather pants and a double-layered topstitched greatcoat in black with a thin toile robe coat beneath it. And so it went on. Some of the pieces were displayed on headless mannequins next door.
Liberated of perceptions of time, space, and the itch of free will to escape it, they also made fine inhabitants of a multicolored frayed patch-leather biker gilet and many of the other pieces shot in the lookbook images here. As an expression of self-will that should see sell through, it was nicely done.
