By Windy Aulia - published
Call it a cultural relocation, the recent Maison Margiela fall/winter 2026 show in Shanghai unfolded like a deliberate placement of the brand’s codes into a city that currently defines the velocity of fashion consumption. It was strategic and symbolic. Glenn Martens, Maison Margiela’s creative director, boldly took the House’s first runway outside of Paris and merged its ready-to-wear and Artisanal lines of the men’s and women’s looks into a single narrative, juxtaposing concept and commerce, couture and replication, as well as idea and object.
The show took place in an industrial shipyard, complete with towering containers, amplifying Margiela’s long-standing fascination with unconventional venues, reinforcing its anti-establishment DNA while simultaneously reframing Shanghai as the new epicentre for avant-garde expression.
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What emerged on the runway was a collection anchored in the poetics of the discarded, drawing inspiration from an imaginary Parisian flea market where garments appeared as found objects, reassembled memories, and spectral remnants of previous lives. Textures taking precedence over overt decoration and silhouettes referencing Edwardian structures filtered through a distinctly Margielan lens of deconstruction and repair. Meanwhile, the presence of masks across every look, signified one of the House’s important codes and reaffirmed the Maison’s enduring commitment to anonymity, a principle embedded since its founding that redirects attention away from identity and towards the garment as the primary site of meaning.
In Marten’s deft explorative hands, these garments were dissected and deconstructed then rebuilt piece by piece, while adding on extra layers of fused textiles or slabs of paint or even beeswax inviting people to take a closer look into the underlying meanings. In this sense Martens did not attempt to overwrite the Margiela language but instead intensified it, pushing its material experiments into a heightened dialogue.
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Some of the most arresting Artisanal looks shown, integrated pieces of broken porcelain as both concept and surface, a material deeply rooted in Chinese cultural history and reinterpreted here as fragile armour. Its cracked glaze and reflective skin linked the collection’s thematic core to its geographic setting in a way that avoided literalism, while the brand’s decision to stage the show alongside a broader series of exhibitions across China further extended this narrative beyond the runway. These exhibitions transformed the collection into part of a wider ecosystem of ideas centred on the House’s foundational codes such as Artisanal, Tabi, Bianchetto, and anonymity, effectively turning China into a temporary archival host of Margiela’s past and future simultaneously.
In Shanghai, iconic Artisanal looks from the time of its founder, Martin Margiela, through John Galliano’s stewardship, stood alongside the current Artisanal looks created by Glenn Martens and the ateliers. Housed inside a row of hollowed containers, much like where the guests were seated at the Shanghai show, these Artisanal looks were displayed in the middle of the city’s blocked-out busy street, visible to the public.
Subsequently, the public in Beijing, Chengdu and Shenzhen will be able to see a different series of display of the Maison’s famous footwear (the Tabi) archival pieces, a collection of masks (for the Maison’s anonymity code) and the Bianchetto pieces, which is Maison Margiela’s play on white-painted garments. In doing so, the House allows the masses to take a peek into the documentation of the process and other archival materials through a Dropbox link, called MaisonMargiela/folder.
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This bold move, apparent within the collection itself, signified an oscillation between restraint and excess, suggesting a deliberate collapse of distinctions between the everyday and the extraordinary. This is a theme that resonates strongly in today’s fashion landscape, which is increasingly defined by hybridity rather than category.
The most striking articulation of this philosophy appeared in said ceramic Artisanal dress; in the thrifted Edwardian Artisanal dress drenched in the House’s Bianchetto technique, as well as in the Artisanal dress made of dégradé-and-beaded historic tapestry, all of which functioned as both object and garment. These dresses were crafted to evoke the delicacy and fracture while maintaining a sculptural rigidity that challenged the very idea of wearability, embodying Margiela’s long-standing interest in transforming non-fashion materials into clothing.
Ultimately, the Shanghai show positioned Margiela at an intersection of heritage and expansion, where the preservation of its radical ethos coexists with an increasingly global and commercially aware audience.
But rather than diluting its identity in the process, the collection demonstrated how that identity can be refracted through new contexts, using location not as backdrop but as a conduit, and in doing so it proposed a version of fashion that is less about seasonal novelty and more about the continuous rewriting of the House’s codes.
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Each of these Maison Margiela moments in China—the runway show and the subsequent exhibitions—recontextualised the brand through scenography that mirrors the House’s fascination with transformation, replication and anonymity. They reveal the making as much as the final form, suggesting that Margiela’s true subject has always been the act of creation itself. All in all, they also show how Maison Margiela continues to resist conformity, insisting instead on fashion as an open system of ideas constantly in flux.