The designer Martin Margiela is famously private. Between 1988 and 2008, the founder of Maison Martin Margiela transformed fashion through deconstruction and a radical rethinking of luxury, while refusing to come out for bows, sit for in-person interviews, or appear in photographs. He then stepped away from the industry entirely, turning his attention to art—which makes his latest project all the more unexpected. On July 9, during Paris couture week, Maurice Auction, in collaboration with Kerry Taylor Auctions, will offer 195 lots in Martin Margiela–Personal Archives—the first time a living creator has worked directly with an auction house to bring such material to market. An accompanying catalog, released online Friday, offers a rare glimpse inside. W is the first to publish images from the archive shoot, along with outtakes.
Maurice Auction cofounder Salomé Pirson first reached out to Margiela last year, after the two auction houses co-organized Martin Margiela, The Early Years: 1988–94, a sale of pieces that had belonged to his former patternmaker, Graziella Picozzi. “I think he saw the results, and he started thinking about his own collection,” Pirson says of the earlier sale, which netted close to €2 million. She was subsequently summoned for the first of a number of audiences with the elusive Belgian designer. “E-mail is not something really familiar to him, so it was mostly in-person discussion for very long hours,” she recalls of the process. “I think he believes that the Internet will one day die.” The meetings took place in a nondescript location where Margiela stores his archive, which Pirson describes as looking like a “random office.” She is careful not to reveal its location.
The space contains little beyond tables, a copy machine, and wall-to-wall shelving filled with boxes in Margiela’s signature white. It recalls his all-white showrooms, where walls, floors, and furniture were roughly painted or swathed in cotton. (One corner features pops of Hermès orange from his time as the maison’s womenswear artistic director from 1997 to 2003.) The boxes are stacked seemingly at random, with black Sharpie labels like “Souvenirs Femmes MMM Femme Objets (90s)” or “Hair & Makeup Images Inspirantes” hinting at their contents. “The telephone wasn’t even in a box,” Pirson says, referring to a white-painted rotary dial phone with his old number scrawled on it, which will be included in the auction. “I don’t think there is any organizing logic. Maybe there is one for him, but it was not obvious.”
One of the most notable aspects of the sale is how few runway pieces it contains. “The models were often paid in clothing, and I think they probably have more than Martin,” says Pirson. There is a pair of spring 1993 jackets upcycled from theater costumes, a spring 1995 reproduction of an 18th-century men’s shirt, and around 60 Hermès pieces from the wardrobe of Margiela’s late mother, Léa Bouchet, including his irreverent take on the twinset, “le triple set,” and a fall 1998 Double Tour watch that remains one of the label’s bestsellers. Clothing from Margiela’s own wardrobe also appears, including a white-painted denim jacket, white cotton sailor trousers, and his signature lab coat. Alex Baddeley of Kerry Taylor Auctions expects strong interest in the latter: “This is the most enigmatic designer in fashion, and you have his personal working coat, complete with stains and paint splatters,” he says.
The sale also encompasses a wealth of preserved ephemera, including invitations, concertina look books, makeup tests, and even champagne corks. The lots extend Margiela’s long-standing engagement with reproduction and remaking. Super 8 films appear on DVD, 11 half-scale mannequins reconstruct key looks from his career— including the fall 1989 smashed-plate waistcoat and a spring 1997 Stockman dress form tunic—and Barbies appear in archival silhouettes wearing tiny silver Tabis.
Margiela famously preferred photocopied sketches for their stylized black lines. Among the lots is his 1987 dossier, which included early visualizations of the future line, that was lost on a train, remade, then found again, leaving no clear distinction between versions. Pencil sketches from the 1983 Golden Spindle competition, made when he was a young design graduate, also surface. “It’s almost like a relic,” says Baddeley.
