Disco Ball Blazer

The twentieth anniversary of the house, and its forty collections, was celebrated in Martin Margiela’s rather festive Summer 2009 collection. Symbolically, it was also the very last collection Margiela designed before quietly leaving his namesake house. The show reunited highlights from 20 years of creation. The blazer, fully decorated with plastic ‘disco’ disks, referenced how the shoulder had been an important element in a Margiela silhouette. The subtle, yet intriguing, nude bodysuits used throughout the show invited the onlookers to focus on the signature blazer rather than the body beneath.
Early in his career, Martin Margiela made the decision to withdraw as a public figure, and let his fashion do the talking. All interviews are consistently given in the first person plural, in the name of the Maison as a whole, and no photographs of the designer are distributed – a sharp reaction against the celebrity cult that dominated the fashion scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, this decision to remain anonymous is translated directly onto the clothing. The incognito strategy of Maison Martin Margiela is still strictly followed through in the presentation of the collections. Models are made anonymous by having their faces covered, as if to protect their identity. They might, for instance, run down the catwalk with veils obscuring their faces or with make-up or hair masking the eyes or the whole face. Here, for example, the "incognito" models have their faces blanked out by stocking scarves.