​​Welcome to the Archive Pull, a series delving into the 30-year history of our print magazine. Here, we look back at a shoot featuring artists Gillian Wearing, Alexis Marguerite Teplin, Goshka Macuga and Jane and Louise Wilson in Maison Martin Margiela, originally published in the March 2006 issue of Dazed & Confused

The Paris Spring/Summer season was not a shy one, even by such usually elevated standards. Riccardo Tisci’s long-awaited debut for Givenchy came and went on a huge, white, circular stage, in a whirlwind of mid-90s style hype which featured shoulder pads to match. Karl Lagerfeld unveiled his collection for Chanel against a backdrop of the world’s largest and most fashionable computer. The show ended with a different model standing on each key and, whichever way one chooses to look at it, that is a lot of inordinately tall, thin women in one place at one time. Then there was the Louis Vuitton party to celebrate the opening of the French megabrand’s biggest and best store, a seven-storey monolith which looms over Paris’ most famous shopping thoroughfare, the Champs Elysees, like some sort of fashion colossus. Sharon Stone, Catherine Deneuve and Uma Thurman were all dutifully in attendance to witness Vanessa Beecroft choreographing more of the world’s most beautiful young women, stripped entirely of their clothes, to form a larger-than-lifesize LV monogram. It was a triumph of contemporary capitalist art if ever there was one.

Amid the madness – quietly and without ceremony – Martin Margiela filled an auditorium in a suburb of Paris with rather less obviously starry types, and sent out his clothes on proudly individual models balanced precariously on rusty old luggage trolleys, and wrapped in red and white packing tape marked “fragile”. These outfits seemed, at times, to be only half-finished – one side was still attached to the rolls of fabric they were cut from. The models perched on the uppers of their shoes, their feet bound to them by straps of thick black elastic. Most remarkable of all, their jewellery was made out of brilliantly coloured ice cubes. Chokers, necklaces and bracelets melted in the glare of the lights to leave lovely trails of pink, blue and ultraviolet across garments deliberately crafted in fluid white fabrics, the better to show off the trickling stains – an extraordinarily thoughtful, unashamedly romantic and yet always fundamentally modern view. At the end of the show, and despite a rapturous response, the designer did not emerge to greet his audience. It is the stuff of fashion legend that Martin Margiela has never, in his two-decade career, stepped out to take his bows, agreed to a face-to-face interview or allowed himself to be photographed for any magazine. Among his other accolades, he remains fashion’s most elusive designer.

For all his unwillingness to present himself in person, Margiela’s status in the industry as the ultimate designer’s designer remains unchallenged. Just this season, his influence can be seen in collections designed by everyone from Miuccia Prada to Viktor & Rolf and from Stella McCartney to Christian Dior.

“We appropriate, we do some vintage pieces – individual vision no longer exists,” the God of French fashion Azzedine Alaia, on characteristically unforgiving form, told French newspaper Liberation recently.” The last designer (who still has individual vision) is Margiela.”

In London, Alexander McQueen is no less impressed. “Of course I like Martin Margiela,” says the designer. “I’m wearing him now. His clothes are special because he pays such attention to detail. He thinks about everything, the cuff of a jacket, the construction of an armhole, the height of a shoulder. It’s very much about cut, proportion and shape, the simplicity of it, it’s so pared down. His clothes are modern classics. There’s not a woman I know who doesn’t have at least one Martin Margiela piece in their wardrobe.”

And so speaks Sophia Kokosalaki: “First of all, I admire his innovation, the way he designs is so clever, so human. I also like his ethos, he has been through a great many changes and has been working for years without compromising that. He’s always kept to his beliefs. I think he has influenced a whole generation of designers and will continue to do so by helping us to realise how important it is to construct clothes in a different way, how important it is to occasionally play down the garments themselves. In details like frayed hems and visible darts, he has invented a whole new vocabulary – a vocabulary of construction. Martin Margiela changed the way we make clothes.”

“In a world that is overrun by faceless executives running luxury conglomerates, Margiela is that rare thing, a true maverick – brilliantly non-conformist and original to the core”

Here’s how it happened – it’s also what little is known of him. Margiela was born in Limbourg, Belgium, in 1959. At the age of 18, he travelled to Antwerp to study fashion at the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts. For three years after graduation, he worked as an assistant at Jean Paul Gaultier, which served not only as his entry into the fashion world, but also as an eye-opener to the difficulties superstar designers face – a reason perhaps, as asserted by those close to Margiela, for his publicity-shy persona. Following graduation in the late 1980s, Margiela took the French fashion establishment by storm. This was, after all, the decade that would go down in history as symbolising everything that is brash and status-driven about designer fashion.

By contrast, Margiela’s clothes were deliberately characterised by a more gentle silhouette – his proposition for the then ubiquitous shoulder pad, was the narrow “cigarette” shoulder which allowed the form of the wearer to show through. Loose silk threads hung like cobwebs from his clothes, seams and darts were reversed, laddered tights were worn over signature “tabi” shoes. And then there was the Martin Margiela label, a simple, white, rectangle, roughly tacked into clothes with stitches of thick white thread at each corner that was immediately recognisable by the tribe of people who wore the designer’s creations, but looked, well, nothing short of a mess to the unenlightened among us.

Following a stint designing Hermès womenswear in the early years of the millennium, Martin Margiela sold a majority stake in his company to Diesel’s Renzo Rosso to allow for expansion. Today, as well as the womenswear mainline (Line 1), there’s Margiela menswear (10), basic garments for women (6), shoes (22) and a more expensive, classic line (4).

Although Maison Martin Margiela is now a global brand, with signature white washed stores in London, Paris and – soon to open – New York, the principles behind both his clothing and the way he handles himself as a designer remain the same. In a world that is overrun by faceless executives running luxury conglomerates, Margiela is that rare thing, a true maverick – brilliantly non-conformist and original to the core.

ALEXIS MARGUERITE TEPLIN

Teplin’s work references an eclectic range of historical sources, and looks into perceptions of femininity and feminism. In an array of formats, her luminous paintings are often displayed as part of a panorama or sit between installations. Her work strives to re-appropriate the accepted feminine aesthetic, while testing the construct that created it.

GOSHKA MACUGA

Polish artist Goshka Macuga’s work challenges traditional ways of exhibiting art as well as the relationship between custodian and artist, creating all-encompassing environments from other people’s work. The exhibition then becomes an exhibit in its own right, the exhibits and their display appropriated as her own.

GILLIAN WEARING

Wearing graduated from Goldsmiths before showing at a range of exhibitions that brought the YBAs to public attention. She creates portraiture using photography, video and recordings, citing the influence of early 70s fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Wearing however sidesteps the obvious, coercing subjects into disguises before they make their revelations.

JANE AND LOUISE WILSON

For their degree, the identical twins submitted identical pieces – photographs showing one trying to drown the other. Their work deals with the dilemma of sharing a vision without having a single mind. Using video, photography and architecture, their art has included an analysis of women in contemporary society and of recent history as manifested in modern architecture.