Maison Margiela’s main line has been in the news of late. From former creative director John Galliano’s monumental Margiela Artisanale show last January to his subsequent departure from the brand in December and the appointment of Diesel creative director Glenn Martens to replace him last month. But while fashion fans obsess over the main line and its creative director, Maison Margiela’s second label, MM6, is quietly growing with more accessible positioning, increasingly experimental show formats, and, most uniquely, a completely anonymous creative team.
While they do not physically hide their faces (and their identity is, let’s be honest, just a Google away), the MM6 creative team is not attributable in the press (and this story). The creative director doesn’t bow at the end of shows; they don’t do wide-reaching interviews about inspiration before every collection; and they’re not on social media.
It’s a unique approach in an industry where creative directors from Jonathan Anderson to Marc Jacobs are stepping further into the spotlight and sharing their personalities on platforms like TikTok, to win favour with young audiences. For MM6, the aim is to “let the clothes do the talking”.
This approach is in the spirit of the house. Maison Margiela founder Martin Margiela was famously private, refusing face-to-face interviews and photos and operating the brand from the shadows, despite his growing fame among fashion insiders. Margiela introduced MM6 in 1997 as a more accessible second line to his more experimental main label, launched in 1988. Today, MM6 ready-to-wear ranges from £150-£1,900, while Maison Margiela RTW ranges from £290-£4,700.
Margiela and MM6 were purchased by OTB in 2002. After Margiela exited the company in 2009, he was succeeded by an anonymous creative team (which we now know was led by Matthieu Blazy), presiding over both MM6 and the main line. MM6’s current anonymous creative director was appointed in 2013, a year before John Galliano took over Maison Margiela. The two brands share a headquarters, on Place des États Unis in Paris, but operate completely separately.
With the exception of Miu Miu, it’s atypical for second lines to do a runway show. But after a series of one-off shows, including one in a New York loft (Spring/Summer 2013) and a London warehouse (AW20), MM6 has shown regularly in Milan since SS22. In January, the brand staged a guest designer show at Pitti Uomo for AW25, its first menswear-focused outing (menswear now represents around 40 per cent of the business). The sleazy, ’90s feel show — which featured models lithely dancing on a raised platform to a Pulp and Stone Roses soundtrack — felt like a watershed moment for MM6, which has long favoured quiet communication (and no advertising). The creative team might not have taken a bow, but they were in the room, blending in with other Margiela employees in the brand’s signature lab coats.
It makes sense for OTB to invest in MM6. As luxury consumers pull back on spending, and the majority of luxury labels see sales declines, the contemporary brand is seeing healthy growth, likely picking up shoppers who can no longer afford top-end product. Its distribution is wide, with 600 global stockists. MM6 declined to share figures but sales grew "healthily" in 2024 bucking industry trends (Over the same period, Maison Margiela’s total sales, including MM6 and the main line, grew 4.6 per cent, while Margiela owner OTB’s group sales declined 3.1 per cent).
Ahead of the brand’s AW25 women’s show, and following its Pitti success, I sat down with a “member of the MM6 creative team” on Zoom, to understand the upswing, explore the anonymity and chart what’s next.
Vogue: Hi [redacted]! We’re around a week out from the MM6 AW25 womenswear show. How is preparation going?
Member of MM6 creative team: It’s going well! I am super excited for this season, especially. I think Pitti set the tone and gave some information on how we should be going forward with MM6. The feedback has been really good, and it’s given us confidence.
Vogue: I wanted to talk about the Pitti show because what I loved was that moment at the end when it felt like the models became part of the party. After the finale, they went up to the bar, among the audience, and everyone stayed for a drink. It felt different. How did you land on that concept?
Member of MM6 creative team: It’s so nice it worked out like that. You never know how something like that will turn out. It’s kind of a Martin [Margiela] thing as well, to let go of those moments and let weird things happen. And that’s exactly what happened there. The audience and the models, everybody reacted in a much more positive way than I was expecting.
Vogue: You mentioned Pitti showed you how to move forward with MM6. Can you elaborate on that?
Member of MM6 creative team: We’ve taken a long time to develop the brand. We have worked on the silhouette, the fabric and the treatments, so now we want people to see it up close. We did this at Pitti and that’s what we want to do with [the womenswear show] as well, to slow the pace down and have that interaction happen. It is about blurring the lines between show and reality.
Vogue: As we know, the business has been growing, even in a challenging moment for fashion more broadly. Why do you think that things have been going so well for MM6?
Member of MM6 creative team: It’s the product. We are very consistent. We don’t really do communication, we’ve just communicated through the product. And that has paid off. Our core attitude has remained the same, and we’ve kept the same consumer. It’s still the woman who can also pick things from the menswear and vice versa; it’s still young and old consumers. People can rely on us, and we don’t shy away from just fine-tuning pieces we’ve made in the past. If we still love it, we know our consumers will too.
Vogue: As you said, MM6 ’doesn’t really do communication’. And, of course, I can’t name you in this story. Why does it work for MM6 as a brand to keep you and your creative team anonymous?
Member of MM6 creative team: I personally relate to the idea of just doing the job. I love that in my job, I can just concentrate on the clothes. I think I save a lot of my time by not being publicly ’out there’. I think it fits with the brand ethos as well, that it’s all about products and also that you never need to explain your work, if you’re not in the mood to explain why we did something, we can just kind of not do that. We’re a team, it’s not just me. Plus it already has one name on it — Margiela — and I think that’s enough.
Vogue: As we’ve seen with all the firings and hirings lately, it feels like the fate of a company lands on one person, and there’s a lot of pressure. Is it nice to spread that pressure in a way by remaining anonymous?
Member of MM6 creative team: Sometimes people ask, ‘How do you work [while being anonymous]?’ And I’m like, what do you mean? We work exactly like any other fashion brand. There’s a creative director, and then there’s a head designer. It’s exactly the same, we just don’t go public. And it’s so funny that people don’t get their heads around that because they feel that fashion designers have to have egos or have to be public figures as well as design. I teach at a design school, and there’s one in 50 that could [do both well].
Vogue: It sounds like the setup works for you. But are there challenges to being an anonymous creative team?
Member of MM6 creative team: Of course. Sometimes you think, would you be somewhere else if you had done the job openly? These moments are always short-lived, though, because then I remember it’s a big plus to have a more ’normal’ life. The industry is such a small industry that the actual insiders know who I am anyway.
Vogue: What can you tell me about the AW25 show and collection?
Member of MM6 creative team: The past two years have been such a big learning curve for us, and we’ve been growing a lot. This season we really want to show just beautiful clothing. [Maison Margiela] has a couture show that very much shouts from the rooftops and is a big moment. So maybe just ’nice clothing’ won’t have our management being like, ’woohoo’ or whatever. But that’s OK. We just want to say a beautiful coat is a beautiful coat.
Vogue: What does that mean for the collection?
Member of MM6 creative team: There are fewer direct references to archive this time. But I don’t think people will think ’ Oh, it’s such a departure’. There’s also less streetwear. That’s what we did with Pitti. We said enough with jeans, enough with cargo pants (we only had a couple in the show). We want to do fashion rather than streetwear. That’s become our mantra, to stay honest about who we are and do collaborations with streetwear-y brands, but not become one of them. [Over the last year, the brand has collaborated with Salomon and The North Face.]
Vogue: Let’s talk about the positioning of MM6. What do people buy into?
Member of MM6 creative team: That’s the beautiful thing about MM6. We can do a really mundane, nice black jacket without a collar, or absolutely bonkers crazy stuff, and they can both be appreciated, sometimes by the same customer…We are for fashion students and grown-ups. I think we are still a little bit for the fashion insiders. But I think also part of the growth we’re seeing is that fashion insiders are a much broader audience today than they were 20 years ago.
Vogue: I’d certainly agree. For example, before, the Tabi felt like such an insider shoe, now it feels like it’s almost mainstream.
Member of MM6 creative team: Yeah, it is interesting. And other brands are even doing Tabis as well. It really has [changed over] the past three to four years.
Vogue: Beyond the shows and collections, what are you excited about when it comes to the future of the brand?
Member of MM6 creative team: I think it would be nice to have a retail presence in Europe, especially in Paris because we don’t have a Paris store right now [the majority of MM6’s stores are in Asia Pacific. There is only one store in Europe, on London’s Conduit St]. I’d like to open a Paris store and start meeting our people, our customers and fans. When we do shows or a store opening, my team and I are always there with our [Margiela uniform] lab coats on. But people don’t know who is who and who does what.
Vogue: Coming back to the AW25 women’s show, obviously, you’ve talked a bit about what you’re aiming for, in terms of the setup and the collection. But what will success look like for you from this show?
Member of MM6 creative team: I think it would be great to see the audience smile but also maybe look slightly uncomfortable and slightly gobsmacked, like ‘What just happened?’. For a long time, I’ve actually been wanting to do shows that are not really runway shows. And I think there’s been pressure from elsewhere, let’s say, to do more traditional shows to build the brand. I get that. But now I would love to take a step back and do more of a ’happening’, that has elements of a fashion show but is blurring the line a bit more. When the audience feels more involved in the situation, I think they get more out of it. That’s what success will look like for me if people see us in a new light, with fresh eyes. I think it’s now a moment to reveal more of who we really are up close.
Vogue: To reveal who MM6 is, without revealing who you really are.
Member of MM6 creative team: Exactly.
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