Challenging perceptions is MM6 Maison Margiela’s entire raison d’être. With its newAvant Premiere collection, the house took recent explorations one step further, venturing into territory both new and old, conflating those through sleight of hand. What would happen, for example, if a leather perfecto was worked flat (instead of just looking that way on screen)? For one, it makes that easy-going staple lighter, a good chunk of its weight having been pared away by trompe-l’oeil, its lapel now permanently picture-perfect. The same goes for a white shirt, a trench: all of a sudden, something familiar looks different, but there’s still more to the story than meets the eye.
That’s because it’s not really about a lapel, a pocket (a focal point of the season), a distressed knit, or the sleight of hand required to make couture-leaning “tulip” finishes from a flipped waistband, or making body-con jersey look like boutis, a traditional Provençal style of quilting. Rather, those are the manifestations of a deep-dive into gestures—the ones required to make the clothes, obviously, but above all the ones that come with inhabiting them functionally, wholly and, more often than not, signaling you’re in on a joke.
References to the original Margiela canon abound (for starters, that boutis has roots in the 1990s). Stonewashed denim with a crinkled-looking finish nods to the designer’s riffs on the hip-hop culture of the early 2000s. Some in the MM6 studio remember the time like it was yesterday, others simply wish they did, and the result is a layering of memories similar to what might be gleaned from a remix, or contemporary art, but transposed into fabric. A duvet coat descended from the seminal collection of fall 1999 obliquely revisits the idea (but shorter and sideways, with pockets) while remaining bang on point. The house’s base may find irony, too, in a bear motif lifted from an actual vintage children’s comforter, rendered here as a patch holding a martini glass. One generation’s bad boy is another’s mogul. Chaotic times call for comforting clothes. Where else but in fashion can those two commentaries—plus plenty of others—co-exist?
Another duality, this time between city and country, was the springboard for a first foray into ready-to-wear for MM6’s long-running collaboration with Salomon. The seed was to take the inevitably “crunchy” aspect of high-performance gear and coax it into anti-athleisure territory. It worked winningly on a Gore-tex macintosh. Speaking of functionality, a cargo pocket harness, extrapolated from a multi-pocket gilet from spring 2004 but now worked in leather, took that idea to a new place, too. It was an apt metaphor for the house’s boundary-pushing philosophy: there is no “cool for cool’s sake.” In the MM6 world, true style comes from an entirely different place.
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