Things that aren’t what they seem are the norm at MM6. A jumpsuit is actually two pairs of pants, conjoined at the waist, the upper pair flipped up over the shoulders. A white dress is the brand’s signature chair cover in white muslin transposed seam for seam as a bib dress. A necklace is a giant, blown-up ring. Nearly every single item contains some kind of clever trick.
Even months of working apart over Zoom couldn’t diminish the MM6 mentality. Perhaps the distance only enhanced it. Eschewing print and color—too hard to see clearly over Zoom, a brand representative said—in favor of standard white, black, beige, and denim, the design team was left to focus on form and function. Playfulness abounds. On a legible level are the hybridized and deconstructed garments: a silk maxiskirt meant to look like a folded-down slip, a trench sliced at the waist into a skirt and jacket, the ultimate shoe pants in thigh highs that mimic the leg of a jean over an ankle boot. Then, there is the delightfully bizarre: tripartite slit leather shoes that can be worn a myriad of ways, from shoe to slipper to sandal. Amid a season of at-home mailers, MM6’s is the strangest: a metal can and string. The list of imaginative uses for it is the size of a poster.
The question is: All this weirdness to what end? Martin Margiela, the brand’s enigmatic founder, could speak directly to his moment with his subversion. What does a bifurcated MM6 studio robe say about the now? That we miss the uniformity and community of office life? (The brand’s video certainly enforces that reading.) The most compelling pieces here are not the trickiest, but the simplest. A pinstripe gray suit with cropped sleeves and wide-leg trousers is hard to resist, a piece that invites the wearer to make it weird in their own way.
