All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
As if in a postmodern fairy tale, the Maison Martin Margiela princess is swathed in an ankle-length skirt fashioned from a pair of trousers, a vastly oversize men’s suit jacket, and—look down!—because she is in fact half ethereal beauty and half wild beast, on her tiny feet she sports a pair of cloven-toed ballet slippers.
The designer Martin Margiela, and the house that still bears his name, has been overturning sartorial assumptions since 1989, questioning preconceived notions of feasibility, functionality, and even basic attractiveness—jackets are chicer for having been crazily exaggerated and turned inside out; an enormous bracelet is, in reality, a watch without a face.
Since he began showing his first collections, the notoriously elusive Margiela (he has rarely if ever been photographed; interviewers were forced to question him by fax) had much in common with the new wave of Japanese designers—Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, et al., and the Antwerp Six, a stunning roster of revolutionaries that included Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck.
Although Maison Martin Margiela was acquired in 2002, and the master is no longer associated with the house, the tradition of radical reinterpretation remains—who else would show an evening cloak composed of vintage baseball gloves, as the house did in its couture show in January? (Answer: no one else.)
Now the Maison has partnered with H&M, a meeting of the rarefied avant-garde and the wonderfully plebeian that we are happy to report has not resulted in diluting the mad signatures of the brand. Instead, the collaboration offers a look back at MMM’s most delightfully outré greatest hits, a retrospective that includes surreal purses sprouting gloves, suit jackets meant for gentle giants, one-shouldered dresses with startling dippy hems, and other adventures in reconstruction. For those who were too young or too broke to wear these things the first time around, the clothes are a wonderful autumn surprise, an early holiday present for the fashion-forward.
Maison Martin Margiela with H&M will be available at select stores November 15; for information: hm.com
