Martin Margiela: withdrawn yet visibly present fashion artist
For exactly twenty years, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela, closely associated with the Six of Antwerp, has been operating at the top level of the international fashion world. His personality and creations earned him the nickname already coined for his famous colleague Jean-Paul Gaultier: enfant terrible de la mode.
Martin Margiela became known for his mosaic-like creations, which were taken apart and then reconstructed with other materials into new unique masterpieces. Conceptual art, on the border of the portable and often beyond that.
He was born in 1957 in Genk. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1979 and spent four years as Jean-Paul Gaultier's assistant designer in Paris before founding the Maison Martin Margiela in 1989. In 2009, he sold the label and disappeared from the scene. All this time Fashion's Most Invisible Man shunned the media and the catwalk; there are hardly any photos of him and he only gave interviews by fax.