Introduction:
“ It is pretty smart to be the Greta Garbo of fashion, and by not showing his identity, I think that Martin Margiela became more exciting, people wondered what he was like. There was a mystery that surrounded him” (Menkes, The artist is absent, 2015)
Martin Margiela a man often referred to as “invisible," seems to have shifted the rules of fashion by positioning the spotlight on the clothes themselves. Although today this might seem as an intelligent marketing strategy, the designers’ intentions were profound and no further did he think this would revolutionise the fashion platform at the time. However his anonymity was held hand in hand with his method of designing, known as “recovery and recycling”, which in the 1980’s seemed shocking and provocative. Martin Margiela, now often mentioned as the man who made deconstruction in clothes believable, derived from the force of taking an anonymous but existing piece of clothing and reworking it into a new concept, somehow interpreted as intellectual, as said by Margiela himself. The aim of this research is to open up a discussion on its historical and technical background, to see how he revolutionised fashion from a
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When referring to ‘conceptual fashion’, fashion journalist and critic Susannah Frankel (2009), made an interesting remark in her essay “The birth, death and re-birth of conceptual fashion” stating “Isn’t the word “concept”, though ultimately just a synonym for idea?”. It is also interesting to note the value of conceptual fashion in the mid 90’s, as it was often regarded as a garment that was initially designed by an idea, where its functionality became silent by the end of the process. Various examples will be given such as the “exhibition staged in Rotterdam in 1997 featuring a collaboration between the designer and a microbiologist”. (Tredre, Polan,