Inside Maison Margiela’s Fence-Swinging Chinese Spectacle
It was a scene straight out of an ’80s John Woo crime thriller: I exited an anonymous black van and stepped into a sprawling marina, the dusklight shimmering off the brawny metal cargo containers stacked high in every direction. A squadron of men in black suits, dark shades, and earpieces were there to greet me. The only real difference between this and, say, the high-octane finale of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow? The disproportionate number of Tabis on the feet of practically everyone around me.
On April 1, the final day of Shanghai Fashion Week, Maison Margiela took over one of the Chinese metropolis’s busiest shipyards to stage its first-ever runway presentation outside Paris. It made for an especially fitting location given the ambitious weekslong project that the show kicked off: A series of exhibitions, dubbed Maison Margiela Folders, set across a quartet of major Chinese cities, each designed to help import the avant-garde house’s most essential codes to the superpower. The first edition opened on April 2 in Shanghai’s ritzy Huangpu District, featuring a display of 58 iconic looks from Margiela’s couture-level Artisanal line; the second, in Beijing, explored the label’s long history of eccentric masks; the third brought nine of the world’s wildest collections of Tabi footwear to Chengdu; and the last, ending today, allows visitors in Shenzhen to slather their own garments in the brand’s signature “Bianchetto” white paint.
The motives behind this major push aren’t all that difficult to comprehend: China remains one of the most vital fashion markets on the planet—the “beating heart of global luxury,” as one LVMH exec recently put it. The opportunity for Maison Margiela, which has opened 26 stores in the country since 2019, to break through with the growing legion of Chinese tastemakers is bigger than ever. “China felt like the right moment to build understanding, not just visibility, and to open Margiela’s language to a new audience,” Glenn Martens, Margiela’s creative director, tells GQ via email.
Of course, none of that would be possible without Martens first delivering a blockbuster fall 2026 collection at the show in Shanghai. The 42-year-old Belgian designer more than held up his end of the bargain: Across 76 coed looks, which combined both ready-to-wear and Artisanal pieces, Martens offered a masterclass in draping and artistry and high-concept freakiness, with enough dyed-in-the-wool Margielaisms in the mix to fill all four Folders exhibits. There were painstaking (and potentially painful) gowns crafted from repurposed materials, like the nearly 200-pound cracked ceramic number that crunched and clanked all the way down the container-flanked runway, or the voluminous glittering shroud covered entirely in gold star stickers. (A Margiela staffer told me the latter took 34 people and 3,000 hours to construct, working from a batch of more than 150,000 stickers.) There were inventive spins on Bianchetto, including a dress dramatically molded from stiff, meringue-like peaks of paint. And there were haunting new masks aplenty, starting with a trio of especially unsettling organza versions printed with dollface makeup that opened the show. As far as introductory handshakes go, this one was about as firm and memorable as you could hope.
