To say the name Martin Margiela is to conjure images of stacked-heel tabi-toe boots and blank labels held in place with four visible stitches. The name also evokes an aura of beguiling mystery, for few know what the Belgian designer—fashion’s invisible man—looks or sounds like. He decided, early in his career, to eschew interviews, avoid the press, and communicate in the first person plural (“We . . . ”) via fax.

Margiela’s shield of anonymity—explained by his business partner, Jenny Meirens, as a personal rather than professional decision—sometimes infuriated, but consistently fascinated, the media. One of its effects was to focus attention on the clothes themselves, created by a team and credited to Maison Martin Margiela, aka MMM. And what intriguing clothes they were: Recall, for instance, a bricolage vest of wire and porcelain; a shirt made of gloves; a sweater of army surplus socks; doll outfits enlarged to adult proportions; precise replicas of vintage garments; pieces made of salvaged, Scotch-taped plastic bags; and, once, hybrid jackets described by an observer as “two-for-one fur coats, spliced together to make four-sleeved monstrosities.”

Schooled in Antwerp and trained by Jean Paul Gaultier, Margiela showed his breakthrough collection in 1989, as Vogue reported, in “an abandoned lot in the seediest section of Paris.” It featured “papier-mâché vests, sheer mesh T-shirts cut open over ragged shirts, and menswear jackets with the sleeves ripped off.”

In the late ’90s, Vogue included Margiela among a group of renegade-turned-establishment designers and asked the elusive Belgian to define the avant-garde. His reply: “A pigeonhole into which the point of view of some is placed when it is considered difficult to assimilate into the lives of many.” Not so long after that, in 2002, he shocked his fans by selling a majority share of his company to the Italian concern that also owns Diesel. Then, in 2009, he flew the coop, resigning from the house that bears his name. Today John Galliano, another iconoclast, heads up the label.

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