Fall/Winter 2025 was a season of Martin Margiela. References abound: new tabi iterations debuted both within the Maison in collaboration Louboutin and without at Kiko Kostadinov; Adrian Appiolaza’s Moschino continued to collide Franco Moschino’s wit with deconstructivism; and Junya Watanabe showed wig jackets that called back to the ones shown in Margiela’s final collection for Spring 2009. Returns to the Margiela archive are nothing new; it has been years since the designer left fashion, but nods to his language appear season after season. However, behind this particular season of references was a pair of sales of pieces from the Margiela archive, with one hosted by Kerry Taylor Auctions and Maurice Auctions, and the other by Byronesque Vintage. The former sale focused on the earliest years of the label, while the latter offered a wardrobe-style collection composed of everyday pieces from seasons spanning the designer’s career. Against the backdrop of a season peppered with returns to the Martin Margiela archive, the dramatically diverging viewpoints of these two Margiela sales provide valuable insights into the work of the ever-influential designer.

The year began with Margiela: the Early Years, hosted in collaboration between Maurice and Kerry Taylor Auctions. The collection was composed of garments from the personal collections of Angela and Elena Picozzi – daughters of Martin Margiela’s former pattern-maker, Graziella Picozzi – and consisted of accessories, pieces, full looks, and even sketchbooks from the years of 1988-1994. During PFW Men’s, the pieces were on display to the public, with the auction concluding at the end of the week. The auction broke records, netting the highest prices Margiela’s archive has ever seen, topping out at a full look from Spring/Summer 1990 that sold for 101,400 euros.

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Byronesque Vintage’s Martin Margiela: Not an Auction provided a very different look into Margiela’s oeuvre. The company’s focus is on the sourcing and sale of contemporary vintage fashion, with a curatorial eye for identifying the clothes that are important enough to deserve retrospective attention. Byronesque has sold a lot of Margiela, hallmarked by a 2017 sale that drew a line out the door. Put-off by the hype, the company was seduced back into the Margiela race by the unique opportunity posed by this sale. The clothes came from Christina Ahlers, who worked as a member of Martin Margiela’s team until 2006, and represented an accumulation of clothes acquired to be worn, not preserved. They were presented on unremarkable clothing racks, in a white apartment, with white sheets over the furniture, and minimal merchandising — an incredibly Margiela setting. But this was not the carefully-curated museum selection of The Early Years — this was a wardrobe.

Iconic pieces like cigarette shoulder jackets (A/W ‘91) and ‘Doll’s Wardrobe’ sweaters (S/S ‘99) were shown alongside simple waistcoats, knits, and dresses, all possessing subtle details that remind us of the designer’s distinctive hand.

Byronesque founder Gill Linton says, “What I like about this collection is that it’s the Margiela uniform of people who were part of his world at the time. Who didn’t imagine that it would be so important decades later.” This is a sale composed of pieces of fashion history – but it is also a sale of everyday clothes.

When a designer like Margiela ascends to the realm of myth, and their work is experienced more through museum retrospectives than shop floors or daily wear, their greatness is reduced to spectacle: untouchable clothes representing unimpeachable legacies. The tactility and embodiment of their work is a luxury experienced by only the lucky few. But these are some of the qualities most important for understanding the works of great designers. This is especially true of Martin Margiela, who was at once an incredible orchestrator of artistic spectacle and the visionary architect of a way of dressing that is to be lived, not just seen. His investment in the everyday is most distilled in his A/W ‘93 collection film, which followed seven women going about their days in locations and looks of their choosing. 

Margiela’s approach celebrated the relationships we develop with our clothes – through experience, through DIY, through styling, and through their eventual destruction. The white box of the modern museum provides a blank canvas against which Margiela’s designs can express their details clearly, but its harsh light dispels that deeply personal sense of intimacy. Byronesque’s sale, presenting a wardrobe in a small Paris apartment, reclaimed some of that emotional resonance in a time when its role in Margiela’s work is often rendered invisible. 

By no means is this a criticism of The Early Years auction; this was a collection of garments the likes of which will never be seen again, and the eye-watering prices they garnered were nonetheless deserved. The face of Margiela with which they engaged deserved the deification of that auction format. But we cannot let that spectacular, legendary, historically-entrenched Martin Margiela overshadow the intimate, light-handed, personal Martin Margiela. The two characters are the product of the same team of designers, and the same body of work, and must be appreciated in tandem to fully appreciate MMM. 

Thank you to both teams for offering us opportunities to appreciate the different sides of Maison Martin Margiela.

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In a season of full of Margiela references, two contrasting auctions offer insights into two different sides of the designer’s language.

Finn Chen

content Curators

The Two Faces of Martin Margiela