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This year, the New York Times' influential style biannual, T magazine, ran a feature extolling the Belgian designer Martin Margiela.
"Even after 20 years in the business, Martin Margiela is still the most elusive figure in fashion," it read, "which might explain why designers feel so free to thumb through his archives for inspiration."
In an unprecedented move, this brief and unusually direct text was illustrated by five catwalk outfits courtesy of Marc Jacobs, AF Vandevorst, Junya Watanabe, Hermes and Prada, above which were printed images of the Margiela originals that had inspired their work.
In September, a legendary spat occurred between the aforementioned Jacobs and the International Herald Tribune's fashion editor, Suzy Menkes, again concerning this determinedly press-shy designer. Jacobs, the darling of the New York fashion circuit, had kept his star-studded audience waiting two hours before starting his spring/summer show and Menkes was not amused. Her review was far from favourable. Not only had Jacobs been late, wrote Menkes, but his show was derivative, relying rather too heavily on the archive of Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and, even more so, Margiela.
Never one to let things lie, Jacobs responded immediately, and in suitably high-profile style, by telling the industry bible Women's Wear Daily: "I've never denied how influenced I am by Margiela or by Rei Kawakubo, those are people that inspire my work. I don't hide that ... Everyone is influenced by Comme des Garcons and by Martin Margiela. Anybody who's aware of what life is in a contemporary world is influenced by those designers."
The people at Comme des Garcons sent Jacobs flowers. This was nothing if not an endorsement of a designer's talent, the sincerest form of flattery. Margiela, meanwhile, said nothing, did nothing. Because if Kawakubo is famously difficult to pin down, Margiela is fashion's invisible man. It is undoubtedly true that his ideas inform some of the world's most powerful talents - although hats off to Jacobs, because few would ever actually admit that fact - but he feels no need to acknowledge any referencing personally.
Since he started out, in 1988, the designer has never agreed to a single interview or been photographed for any magazine, however respected the title. Particularly in a climate where the superstar designer - from Jacobs to Prada, and from Tom Ford to Vivienne Westwood - might hardly be described as backwards in coming forward, one could be forgiven for thinking that Margiela is a figment of the industry's imagination.
In March 1997, in Paris for the ready-to-wear shows, I arrived at my hotel to find a crumpled scrap of paper printed with a map of Paris among the by-now familiar mountain of invitations and made a fatal fashion faux pas by throwing it straight into the bin.
If Margiela has always been famous for doing away with normal show requirements - minor considerations such as having a runway, for example, or even models - then his invitations are no less conventional. When guests arrive at a Margiela show, they are, for the most part, seated on a first-come, first- served basis.
Margiela's collections have been shown, variously, on large, round dining tables in a dilapidated warehouse space; in disused subway cars; in the stairwell of a crumbling town house. On this particular occasion, the map in question marked the spot to which where press were instructed to travel - a wholly unremarkable street corner in the French fashion capital, as it turned out - and await the arrival of a bus filled with the designer's tall, thin, beautiful friends, admittedly all wearing his new season's designs, accessorised by fetching fur wigs, and with an appropriately lugubrious Belgian brass band in tow.
The video, sent out after the event for anyone who hadn't made it, only added to the characteristically surreal nature of it all. The entire show had been filmed on its side, complete with passers-by staring in disbelief at the proceedings, not to mention the clothes. Shoulder pads were pinned to the outside of garments; coats and jackets were cut in half and attached to sludge-coloured, vaguely sci-fi sleeveless shells; floor-length skirts and dresses were made out of nothing more haute than the lightweight, low-budget silk normally only used for the linings of designer tailoring. Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah went the Belgian brass band.
To the uninitiated, at least some of Margiela's designs may seem confrontationally anarchic, but to know them is to love them. Until recently, Margiela showed his designs on "real" people, as those who work in fashion like to describe them, as opposed to professional models.
While Margiela's aesthetic may not be obviously commercial, his clothes sell extremely well, both in his own boutiques and department stores, where a customer might pick up a Margiela jacket and buy it, just because it suits them, knowing little, or nothing at all, about the person behind its making, and proving that the customer might be more discerning than all too many would have us believe.
Everyone who's anyone in fashion, meanwhile, wears Margiela _ French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquiere, Alexander McQueen, the list goes on. There are 14 Margiela stores worldwide, with plans to open new outlets in Dubai, Hong Kong, Moscow and Munich over the next six months. In November, Margiela will launch a small fine jewellery collection and eyewear _ his first pair of sunglasses, an impenetrable black band that wraps right around the face is called "L'Incognito", aptly enough. Next year sees the birth of the first ever Martin Margiela fragrance, created in collaboration with L'Oreal.
"Of course I like Martin Margiela," British designer McQueen says. "I'm wearing him now. His clothes are special because of the attention to detail. He thinks about everything, the cuff of a jacket, the construction of an armhole, the height of a shoulder. I think it's very much about cut, proportion and shape, the simplicity of it, the pared down-ness of it. His clothes are modern classics. There's not a woman I know who doesn't have at least one piece of Martin Margiela in her wardrobe."
The designer Sophia Kokosalaki goes further:
"He has influenced a whole generation of designers, and will influence generations to come. The frayed hems, the visible darts, he has invented a whole new vocabulary, a vocabulary of construction. Margiela changed the way we make clothes."
This is what little is known about Margiela. He was born in Limbourg, Belgium, in 1959 and, aged 18, moved to Antwerp to study fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1979. Between 1984 and 1987 he worked as a design assistant for Jean Paul Gaultier, then at the height of his fame.
It is said that Margiela's refusal to engage with the press is due at least in part to his experience of the havoc the wrong kind of publicity can wreak on a designer, and specifically the experience of Gaultier, who later told journalists he was overlooked for the job at Christian Dior following Gianfranco Ferre's retirement because of his less-than-haute role as the kilt-and-Breton-T-shirt-wearing presenter of Eurotrash.
More generally, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that any hype surrounding a designer celebrity is likely to be short-lived. Best then to resist the glare of the spotlight and concentrate, instead, on the product itself. Margiela resolved to do just that.
He burst on to the Paris fashion scene during the spring/summer 1989 season, taking the establishment by storm, transforming a leather butcher's apron into a sinuous evening dress and ripping apart a vintage tulle ballgown to create a sequence of beautifully cut jackets.
Struggling to understand this fledgling talent, the press labelled his work "deconstruction". Seams were reversed, darts were exposed, loose threads were allowed to hang down like cobwebs.
Margiela's use of an unmarked white label also signifies that he has never claimed to be the sole author of his work. The curious are instructed to send questions to be answered by his team collectively. One reply reads:"The many others working on the garments and for a house - assistants, pattern-cutters, tailors, commercial staff - also express their expertise and sensitivity through the work of a designer."
The fact that anyone employed by Maison Martin Margiela wears a white coat - either the long version usually used by models between fittings, or the shorter design famously sported by staff at the Paris haute-couture ateliers - also immediately identifies them as part of the team.
Walls in all the stores and his Paris headquarters are all painted white.
Make a purchase in a Margiela store and your clothing will be folded neatly into a white calico sack, which may not have quite the kudos of a glossy, tissue-paper filled logo-stamped carrier, but has found its use among insiders as the most fashionable laundry bag in the world. White - or "whites", in Margielaspeak - allows the designer to express his enduring interest in the effect that the passing of time has on our lives.
In 2002 Margiela sold a majority stake in his company to Renzo Rosso, owner of denim company Diesel. Women's Wear Daily described this, uncharitably, as like a marriage between Greta Garbo and Harpo Marx.
Although Margiela was a designer who had always valued his independence, following the mid-1990s and the buying spree led primarily by LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) and the Gucci Group, the economic climate was such that, for a designer to survive, he had to have the might of a corporation behind him. Maverick or otherwise, Margiela's business had outgrown itself, and to develop needed to move with the times.
Over the past two decades, Margiela has been responsible for many of the most beautiful and intelligent fashion statements of all time. He has taken fabrics normally associated with soft furnishings - flock wallpaper, wooden-beaded car-seat covers, quilted Chesterfield sofas - and transformed them into clothing. Another season was marked by a predominantly white collection worn with ice jewellery dyed magenta, ultraviolet and lapis lazuli, designed to melt away on to the clothes, leaving permanent trails of bright colour behind it. Margiela's tailoring is both highly inventive and subtly empowering.
Despite accolades, the designer remains as removed from the hysteria and histrionics that surround the fashion industry as ever.
While his silence is maintained, his work continues to speak volumes, after all.
- INDEPENDENT
