Untitled. Who is Martin Margiela?

Who is Martin Margiela? Ground-breaking fashion designer born in Belgium, Martin Margiela founded the Parisian brand Maison Martin Margiela, which he was the designer of until 2009, when, suddenly, he stepped back, claiming he had nothing more to say and design. A true creative genius, for more than twenty years he dictated fashion trends, challenging conventions and presuppositions, without the actual intention of making a tabula rasa of the fashion industry, but rather to playfully explore its boundaries. His style is so conceptual that, somehow, we enter the domain of art rather than fashion. Martin Margiela purposefully made it difficult for others to define him, and the mysterious aura that surrounds him is one of the reasons why he’s so interesting even today. The idea of identity, however, has always been central to him in many ways. The exhibition Untitled is nonetheless focused on one particular aspect: how the brand, in the years under Margiela’s guidance, employed the format of the automatic portrait to investigate the boundaries and balances between self-identification and brand identity. What the exhibition sets out to underline is how a whole photographic tradition, deeply rooted in the very first experiments on the device itself, can be summoned up again in fashion, a field very far from those of its original use (medicine, psychiatry, criminology, and anthropology) and in a historical context completely changed, questioned, manipulated, or rather, to use the most suitable term when it comes to Martin Margiela, ‘deconstructed’ to achieve newer aims.