at 20 The Exhibition, MoMu, 28 Nationalestraat, Antwerp, until 8 February.
When Antwerp's Mode Museum opened six years ago, its position plum in the centre of the city's commercial fashion district signalled the integrated role the institution saw for itself in the daily life of the city. The museum building—ModeNatie—is also home to Antwerp's famous fashion academy, and the students that pass through its hallways are now as likely to be Japanese as they are Belgian.
Currently, these polyglot students share their hallway with an undistinguished white caravan and an exhibition banner knotted from wire fencing and plastic carrier bags. This studied exercise in anti-glamour is the opening work in a show dedicated to the school's most celebrated alumnus, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela.
Within the rarefied world of Parisian haute couture, Margiela's fashion house—Maison Martin Margiela—has dedicated itself to challenging the modern fashion industry that has grown out of the couture tradition. It has survived on the margins of high fashion for 20 years, offering collections featuring sweaters made of soldiers' socks, jackets stitched from elasticised bandages and evening dresses with the seams gaping open. Respected for the redoubtable tailoring that underpins its work, the Maison's house style is still doggedly awkward, trend bucking, anti-fashion; and it's currently at the peak of its commercial success.
Since its foundation, fascination has surrounded the house's determined privacy. No designer appears at the end of its catwalk to pose with the models: Martin Margiela has remained invisible to the public for most of the last two decades. The 70-odd members of the Maison only appear in public kitted out in the anonymous white-coated uniform of the old couture houses. Where other fashion houses promote glamour and allure, the Maison Martin Margiela offers perhaps the purest form of escapism to be found in fashion—the suggestion that those who purchase its collections have risen above the cheap dreams touted by the rest of the industry. Margiela clients understand fashion—so the notion goes—but they feel no need to participate in the round of endlessly shifting desire that drives it.
Between the trousers brushed with house paint, the sweaters with artfully twisted seams and the laboriously aged surface of its shirts, the Maison sells the prospect of transforming your body into a perambulatory gallery. From the snob perspective, wearing these white-labelled garments is a little like walking around with a discreet tag reading "Hello, I own a Rothko." The Maison's clients are sold not just clothes, but statements about clothes; functional design that comes accessorised with an invisible book of critical theory.
Margiela-watching is an activity stiff with cliché, the most popular being that he is "the designer's designer;" the second, that he is making "art." Neither is a simple compliment. In fashion journalism, "art" is a label used to indicate something that you don't understand, are not sure that you like, and certainly don't know how to respond to. Calling someone a "designer's designer," meanwhile, waspishly suggests that their output has negligible commercial appeal. With the Maison's work now elevated to the status of a museum exhibit, both axioms merit investigation.
Imagined as art—as the current exhibition explicitly invites visitors to do—the Maison's primary subject is fashion itself, with its relationship to mainstream fashion being rather like that of a Rachel Whiteread sculpture to a bathtub. Fashion provides the form of the Maison's work—clothing and accessories—and stimulates an artistic investigation into issues associated with it. In addressing the question of body image for summer '99, the Maison presented a collection called A Doll's Wardrobe, which reproduced the clothing of Barbie, Ken and GI Joe dolls to a human scale, complete with thick threads, faults and giant snap fastenings. Eighteen months later they fitted and moulded a collection to a size-78 tailors dummy: the pieces hung off slighter souls with the ghostly imprint of a handsome set of breasts and buttocks still straining in the structure of the fabric. The Mode Museum itself has been creative in its attempts to animate the Maison's clothes but, unless you are the genre of fan liable to swoon in ecstasy at the sight of, say, a cocktail dress once worn by Audrey Hepburn, fashion exhibits are intrinsically an unsatisfying experience. Necessarily, turning fashion into "art" separates the work from its context. Untouchable in a display, a vast worn-in sweater could well be one of your grandmother's cast-offs. In fact, if this is art, then it doesn't truly become so until it's on the body (and MoMu are evidently aware of this problem: during the exhibition of that other artist/designer Yohji Yamamoto, they offered outfits to try on within the exhibition.)
Then there is the matter of being a "designer's designer." The Maison's workmanship and obsession with traditional techniques of haute couture—subjects amply explored at the museum—do elicit considerable respect, but ultimately, the label says more about how the industry regards the Maison than anything about the Maison's own output. It is set apart from the rest of the high fashion world less by holding its fashion shows in the local café or making dresses out of hair, than by surviving 20 years without having to submit to such indignities as house perfumes or celebrity endorsements. It has become, in some way, the aesthetic conscience of haute couture.
