Maison Margiela

Maison Margiela introduced Scentsorium on 21 April 2026 as a boutique collection of six genderless parfums. Developed through the working principles of the Artisanal atelier, the project brought high-concentration perfumery, crafted vessels and a dedicated retail environment into Line 3.

MaisonMargiela/folders began with the combined Autumn/Winter 2026 show in Shanghai and continued through exhibitions in China around Artisanal, Anonymity, Tabi and Bianchetto. For the first time the house opened working Dropbox folders containing images, timelines, press releases and documents, making the archive a public, evolving structure.

Maison Margiela did not appear on the official Paris Fashion Week womenswear Autumn/Winter 2026–27 calendar in March 2026. The absence preceded the house’s combined ready-to-wear and Artisanal presentation in Shanghai on 1 April.

Maison Margiela Residences marked the house’s first venture into residential living, developed in Dubai with architect Carlo Colombo and Alta Real Estate Development. The project extended Line 13-adjacent thinking about objects, white surfaces and altered domestic utility into architecture and long-term habitation.

Line 2 launched in Seoul as a programme built around dialogue between two artists or disciplines rather than a product category. Its first project joined visual artist Heemin Chung and sound artist Joyul in Elsewhere, Rhema, Open Torso at the Maison’s Hannam flagship during Frieze Seoul.

Glenn Martens became Maison Margiela creative director on 29 January 2025. His opening collections joined masks, recovered matter and Artisanal handwork to an increasingly direct ready-to-wear wardrobe, followed by a combined show in Shanghai in 2026.

Maurice Auction presented Martin Margiela: The Early Years, 1988–94 on 27 January 2025 from the archive of Angela and Elena Picozzi. Its 276 lots documented the house’s first seasons through garments, accessories, invitations and working traces gathered by early supporters rather than from Margiela’s own collection.

Christian Louboutin and Maison Margiela released two linked footwear capsules in March 2025. Each house revised the other’s most recognisable sign: the Tabi moved through Louboutin’s forms, while Maison constructions took on the red sole in a deliberately reciprocal exchange.

Maison Margiela announced the end of John Galliano’s ten-year tenure on 11 December 2024. His final runway collection had been the Spring/Summer 2024 Artisanal presentation beneath Pont Alexandre III, closing a period that made couture, film and live performance the house’s principal image-making laboratory.

Maison Margiela and Gentle Monster began a continuing eyewear collaboration in 2023. Shielded lenses, wrapped profiles and sculpted frames expanded Line 8 through concealment and altered proportion, with successive chapters treating the frame as both facial architecture and fashion object.

Fine jewellery was assigned Line 12 in 2022, adding a specialist category for precious material, casting and displaced scale. Familiar objects and bodily details could now be reconsidered through a permanent jewellery structure within the numbered house architecture.

Recicla launched through the Autumn/Winter 2020 Co-Ed collection as a programme for selected vintage garments and accessories. Each object was restored and reworked as a limited piece while retaining its provenance, extending Replica from reproduction into the direct recirculation of existing clothing.

Maison Margiela and Reebok joined the Instapump Fury to the split-toe Tabi in 2020. The hybrid placed one of the house’s oldest forms inside a widely recognised technical sneaker, preserving the inflated upper while changing the shoe’s stance, toe and cultural register.

The Palais Galliera opened Margiela / Galliera 1989–2009 in Paris with Martin Margiela’s direct involvement. The exhibition traced the women’s collections through garments, invitations and show material, presenting two decades of construction and display as a coherent body of work.

Jenny Meirens died in Italy on 1 July 2017. The house’s tribute named her as Martin Margiela’s business partner and one of the visionaries behind the scenes, prompting wider recognition of her co-founding role in the company, blank label and collective communications model.

We Margiela premiered in October 2017 with Jenny Meirens and former team members recounting the house from inside its collective structure. The documentary restored Meirens’s co-founding role to the centre of the story and examined how anonymity, business practice and group authorship worked together.

John Galliano presented his first collection for the house to a small audience in London on 12 January 2015. Beginning with Artisanal placed reconstruction and atelier work at the centre of his mandate, while his drape, character studies and historical references opened a new named-author period.

The short documentary The Artist Is Absent assembled collaborators and observers around Martin Margiela’s work while preserving his physical absence. Released during the Tribeca Film Festival, it treated anonymity as a productive part of the house’s history rather than a mystery to be solved through a face reveal.

The house adopted the name Maison Margiela in January 2015, removing Martin from the public brand name shortly after John Galliano’s first Artisanal collection. The change marked an institutional transition rather than a new foundation.

John Galliano directed Maison Margiela from October 2014 to December 2024. He made Artisanal the principal couture and image-making laboratory, then translated its methods into Co-Ed ready-to-wear, Icons, Recicla, film and live performance.

Maison Martin Margiela developed stage wardrobe for Kanye West’s Yeezus tour in 2013, including couture and ready-to-wear clothing, footwear and face-obscuring masks. The project moved the anonymity code into arena performance, where concealment became part of a globally recognisable public image.

Maison Martin Margiela with H&M released on 15 November 2012 as a global high-street collection. Rather than designing a conventional diffusion capsule, the studio reproduced garments from more than two decades of the house and labelled each edition with the season and year of its source.

Hand-encrusted face coverings transformed the house’s long-standing anonymity code into a reflective, jewel-like surface for Autumn/Winter 2012 Artisanal. The masks concealed identity while intensifying the image, showing how an anti-celebrity device could also become an object of spectacle.

Replica entered fragrance in 2012 through scents named for remembered places, times and sensations. The familiar cotton label shifted from documenting a copied garment’s provenance to framing perfume as the reconstruction of an atmosphere or personal memory.

The house’s Artisanal programme received formal haute couture recognition in 2012. The status placed its long-running reconstruction and atelier practice within the institutional couture structure while preserving the Artisanal name.

Martina Tiefenthaler entered Maison Margiela’s small women’s studio in 2011 as Demna’s intern, then became his assistant and right hand. The role was her entry into fashion practice before work at Vetements, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga.

Matthieu Blazy joined the anonymous studio in 2011 and became head designer across Artisanal and ready-to-wear. Press reporting identified him publicly in 2014, exposing the tension between individual studio leadership and the house’s collective credit.

(untitled) became the house’s first released fragrance in 2010. Its green, dry composition and unbranded parenthetical name translated the blank-label attitude into scent while establishing a product category that would later expand through Replica and Scentsorium.

Demna worked within Maison Martin Margiela’s anonymous studio and led work on women’s collections through 2013. The role preceded Louis Vuitton, Vetements and his later named creative direction at Balenciaga and Gucci.

Maison Margiela continued through an anonymous studio after Martin Margiela’s withdrawal. Named members later associated with the period include Nina-Maria Nitsche, Demna, Matthieu Blazy and Martina Tiefenthaler, while official collection authorship remained collective.

Martin Margiela completed his withdrawal from the house in 2009 after stepping back through the preceding seasons. Maison Martin Margiela continued without a publicly named successor, moving collective authorship from a founder-era principle into the operating condition of the studio itself.

Following Martin Margiela’s departure, Ackermann was formally approached in 2009 about succeeding him at Maison Martin Margiela. He declined and continued to concentrate on his own label, so the contact belongs to his institutional chronology but does not constitute an appointment or collection authorship.

MoMu opened 20 The Exhibition in Antwerp for the house’s twentieth anniversary. Garments, objects, spaces and recurring codes were organised through the Maison’s collective language rather than a conventional designer biography; the exhibition later travelled to Munich and London.

The Spring/Summer 2009 runway gathered two decades of house signs into a live anniversary: lab coats, archive references and a walking birthday cake. Presented while Martin Margiela’s withdrawal was becoming visible, it functioned as a celebration and an unsettled closing marker for the founder period.

Line 8 introduced eyewear for Spring/Summer 2008. Frames, shields and lenses extended the house’s treatment of concealment and altered proportion to the boundary between face, object and field of vision.

Fragrance entered the numbered architecture as Line 3 in 2008. The category later developed through (untitled), Replica Memories and the Scentsorium, carrying the house’s interest in provenance, association and material atmosphere into scent.

Maison Martin Margiela presented Artisanal within the haute couture schedule for the first time in 2006. The move placed one-off reconstruction, recovered matter and atelier duration into direct conversation with the institutional traditions of Paris couture.

Footwear became Line 22 for Autumn/Winter 2005, gathering a category that had been present since the first Tabi in 1988 and had previously sat within accessories. The line gave split toes, altered heels and reconstructed shoe archetypes a dedicated place in the numbered system.

Line 14 introduced the men’s wardrobe category for Spring/Summer 2005. The line centred repeatable garments and house construction, complementing the seasonal experiments of Line 10 with pieces intended to remain in use beyond a single runway cycle.

Line 11 established bags and small leather goods as a specialist category in 2005. Familiar containers, linings, closures and handles became sites for inversion, enlarged scale and visible construction rather than neutral supports for a logo.

Line 4 introduced a continuing women’s wardrobe for Spring/Summer 2004. Recurring garments and everyday use sat alongside the more seasonal Line 1 collection, giving the numbered system a distinct category for durable wardrobe forms.

OTB became majority owner of Maison Martin Margiela in 2002 and took full control in 2006. The ownership change ended the house’s fully independent structure while the founder-led studio continued until 2009.

Line 13 brought furniture, domestic objects and printed matter into the numbered house structure in 1999. It allowed white paint, reuse, trompe-l’œil and altered utility to operate beyond the dressed body and across interior and editorial space.

Line 10 established the main men’s collection within the numbered system for Spring/Summer 1999. Menswear extended the house’s treatment of altered proportion, exposed structure and existing garment types through a distinct seasonal programme.

Harley Hughes led menswear design at Maison Martin Margiela for four years as Line 10 became an established part of the house. He left in 2002 for a later menswear role at Yves Saint Laurent.

The principal women’s collection entered the numbered architecture as Line 1 in 1998. The designation separated the runway proposition from wardrobe and specialist categories while keeping the house’s constructional experiments connected across them.

Lutz Huelle joined Maison Martin Margiela after graduating from Central Saint Martins and worked in the small Paris studio for three years. The experience linked garment alteration, everyday dress and collective work to the independent practice he launched in 2000.

Replica formalised the reproduction of selected garments by naming their type, place and period of origin on a descriptive label. The programme treated copying as an act of preservation and attribution, placing the previous life of an object inside its new circulation.

Patrick Scallon directed art and communications for Maison Martin Margiela from 1993 to 2008. He helped maintain the house’s collective voice, press language and international communications network without conventional advertising or designer publicity.

Nina-Maria Nitsche joined the early Maison Martin Margiela studio and became one of its longest-serving senior designers. Her tenure crossed the founder-led and post-founder studio periods before she left in 2012.

A plain white label fixed by four visible stitches replaced the conventional branded tag. Jenny Meirens proposed the nameless label and Martin Margiela added the removable corner stitching, creating a sign that could identify the house while questioning the authority of the logo.

Bianchetto introduced white paint as a mutable house surface across garments, footwear, objects and interiors. Wear, cracking and abrasion allow the coating to record time, so white functions less as a pristine finish than as a layer that reveals contact and use.

Artisanal began in 1989 as the house’s workshop for singular garments made from existing clothing, recovered materials and time-intensive hand processes. Later identified as Line 0, it gave reconstruction a continuing atelier structure rather than confining it to a single seasonal gesture.

Face-obscuring fabric appeared in the first Maison Martin Margiela presentation and became a recurring house device. The mask redirected attention toward garment, stance and collective image while resisting the runway’s usual emphasis on a recognisable model or designer personality.

The split-toe Tabi appeared in the house’s first runway collection. Its soles were painted red so that the models left hoof-like traces across a white runway cloth, turning an adapted working form into both footwear and evidence of the show’s passage.

Maison Martin Margiela presented its first collection in Paris in October 1988 for Spring/Summer 1989. The debut established a fashion practice built around exposed construction, recovered clothing, unconventional casting and settings outside the established runway circuit.

Jenny Meirens co-founded Maison Martin Margiela and shaped its business, retail and communications structure. She proposed the blank label, brokered the Hermès appointment, sold her stake in 2002 and retired from fashion in 2003.

Martin Margiela co-founded the house with Jenny Meirens and directed its clothing from 1988 until his withdrawal in 2009. The tenure established deconstruction, Replica, Artisanal, the Tabi and collective public authorship as recurring house methods.