Introduction
Jenny Meirens was a Belgian retailer, buyer, producer and communications strategist who co-founded Maison Martin Margiela with Martin Margiela in Paris in 1988. Before the house, she ran the Brussels boutique Crea and opened Belgium’s first Comme des Garçons store, bringing retail experience and an international network to the partnership.
Meirens structured the company when outside investment did not appear, managed business decisions, advised on fittings and cultivated long relationships with stores and buyers. She proposed the nameless white label; Margiela added the visible white stitches. Together they built a collective public voice and a press culture without advertising, designer portraits or conventional seating hierarchy.
She also brokered Margiela’s 1997 appointment at Hermès, which supported the independent house during a period of growth. Meirens sold her stake to OTB in 2002 and retired from fashion in 2003. Her testimony in We Margiela and later interviews established her not as a supporting business figure but as a co-author of the house’s institutional and visual language. She died in 2017.
Design ethos
Meirens treated creative freedom and commercial discipline as interdependent. She favoured a small independent company, patient relationships with specialist retailers and clothing strong enough to be understood without advertising. The blank label and collective first-person plural made this position visible without turning it into a conventional campaign.
Her communications work resisted hierarchy. Press and buyers could be seated by arrival rather than status, invitations could take the form of classifieds or children’s drawings, and editors were not courted through the usual social rituals. These decisions made access, audience and distribution part of the house’s authorship.
Her approach to product was direct: fittings, customer response and the practical life of a store mattered alongside concept. That combination allowed Margiela’s exposed construction, unusual proportion and reuse of ordinary materials to reach a durable international network without being separated from the conditions in which the clothes were sold.
Disclaimer
Career history
2017
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.
2017
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.
1989
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.
1988
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.
1988
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.
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