Maverick fashion house Maison Margiela stages fantastical fall/winter show in Shanghai | Canada Voices

If you know anything about Maison Margiela, the wickedly maverick French fashion house, you’re likely not all that surprised that it skipped out on Paris Fashion Week to debut its fall/winter 2026 collection. Instead, the brand travelled to Shanghai where, on April 1, it staged a mixed couture and ready-to-wear show at a shipyard on the edge of the city.

Its maze of blue, green and rust red containers, some hollowed out for front row seating, towered against the dusky sky. Bells tolled as the opening notes of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ murder ballad Where the Wild Roses Grow sounded out, setting the rhythm of the models’ slow, deliberate walk.

The sprawling, 76-look collection opened with corseted gazar dresses made with layers of printed glass organza, mirroring the glazed appearance of porcelain and paired with masks impressed with the faces of antique dolls. Following the theme of a flea market coming to life after dark, the proceeding looks featured suiting with raw edges, Edwardian silhouettes with the collars and tails slashed off, and jackets and dresses created by fusing disparate vintage pieces found at Parisian second-hand shops.

In those stores, Maison Margiela creative director Glenn Martens and his team also found porcelain dolls from the 1870s, which became the starting point for the collection. “It was a bit of a darker vibe,” the designer said of the initial idea for the show. That darkness, or “gloominess,” as he called it, is characteristic of his creations, perhaps because of his Belgian roots: “A grey land where it rains every single day,” he said. Yet there were moments of lightness, too, in diaphanous chiffon dresses and velvet looks in blush, deep purple and lime.

The Shanghai show was a moving, fantastical spectacle and follows years of investment in the Asian market. Margiela is expanding in Canada too. The label opened its first Canadian store last year, at Yorkdale mall in Toronto, with a second store slated to open at Vancouver’s Oakridge Park in late May.

“I think Canada is a very interesting market,” said Margiela CEO Gaetano Sciuto at the show. “It’s both fashion and functional, because Canada is more international. There’s a lot of different cultures. It’s a place that has a lot of values shared with the brand, but we have to educate people because the brand is new [there].”

For a relatively young label, there’s a lot to learn. Founded in Paris in 1988 by Belgian designer Martin Margiela and his creative partner Jenny Meirens, the house quickly distinguished itself from its luxury peers. For his Fall 1989 show, Margiela brought the global fashion elite to a playground in a predominantly North African neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. There was no assigned seating; local kids filled the front row. Models made their way across the uneven ground in voluminous canvas skirts and trousers. The kids, unable to sit still, eventually joined in, some riding atop the models’ shoulders.

Prada designer Raf Simons, who was there that evening, told The Business of Fashion in a 2016 interview, “I was so struck by everything I was seeing that I started to cry. I was like, ‘Oh God, look at the ground, everyone’s going to see you’re crying’…Then I look around, and half the audience was crying.” The show is widely cited as a defining moment in fashion history, signalling a shift in how collections are presented and consumed. Margiela left the label he founded in 2009, but staging shows in unconventional settings and democratizing access to high fashion remain its hallmarks.

Margiela is known today for its near-religious set of aesthetic codes, including split-toe shoes (called Tabi, after the traditional Japanese sock), masked models, deconstructed clothing and the white lab coats worn by its team to signify collectivity. Last year, Glenn Martens took over from John Galliano as creative director, ending the latter’s 10-year tenure. Martens began his career at Jean Paul Gaultier before launching his own label in 2012 and taking the reins at Y/Project the following year. In 2020, he was named creative director of denim brand Diesel, which he continues to lead in addition to Margiela (both are owned by OTB Group, which also manages Jil Sander, Marni and Viktor&Rolf).

Following the Shanghai show, the brand communicated this history by expanding the experience beyond the shipyard. A series of public exhibitions across China included a display on the house’s couture collection, Artisanal, in Shanghai; a history of the label’s masks in Beijing; a look at the personal archives of Tabi shoe collectors in Chengdu; and a workshop on the brand’s white overpainting technique, Bianchetto, in Shenzhen. For the initiative, called Maison Margiela/folders, the house made its archive freely accessible to the public via the file hosting service Dropbox.

“In this luxury industry, everything is very secretive and very closed doors,” Martens said. “Margiela was born as an idea of inclusivity, of taking fashion to the streets.” Community is one of Margiela’s fundamental values, he continued, and sharing these folders is a way to let people be a part of the house.

That cultural exchange goes both ways. The most artistically ambitious looks of the fall/winter collection were the ones inspired by Chinese craft. Instead of merely mimicking the look of Chinese porcelain, one look featured a dress and mask made from 500 porcelain pieces that were shattered and affixed to an underlayer. Each of the model’s steps created the sound of breaking ceramics. Beeswax, which also has a long history as a creative medium in the country, covered an Edwardian mourning dress, its rot-coloured splotches resembling lichen on a long-neglected gravestone. The piece introduced an element of temporality, as if the substance might start melting before the audience’s eyes.

The Globe and Mail Style Magazine travelled as a guest of Maison Margiela, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.