The Disappearance as Masterpiece

 

Martin Margiela turned his back on an industry that adores famous faces and supermodels more than fabrics or designs. While others obsessed over appearing on the covers of Vogue, he responded by fax to anyone trying to contact him. It wasn’t whimsy: he was demolishing the cult of ego, that counterfeit currency that seeks to validate everything as part of fashion.

Maison Margiela burst onto the scene in 1988 as pure sabotage in the world of fashion. Invitations on white paper that arrived with just the date and place. No more information, summoning clandestine rituals. Shows in dusty warehouses, forgotten train stations, supermarkets where models emerged among shopping carts. Faces hidden behind masks of broken mirrors that reflected the gaze back at the audience, no supermodels, no super famous. Margiela inverted the game: Who is watching whom? Art or commodity? He questions what you think you see.

The blow was silent. The industry imposed seasons like dogmas, obsolescence as absolute faith. Margiela rummaged through flea markets, rescued World War II uniforms for haute couture, worn out socks into sweaters. Linings exposed like entrails, seams in plain view, white labels numbered from 0 to 23, no name. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed: a weapon against a system that kills what was created just months ago.

This deconstruction echoes Jacques Derrida, who in the eighties dismantled texts to expose cracks. Margiela applied it to Victorian dresses or fifties suits, revealing hidden structures. Every visible seam asked: why does the new surpass the repaired? Who sentences an object to death? His pieces held memory in every thread, forgotten sweat, a stain that tells a life. In a world that discards, Margiela insisted: the broken contains more truth than the intact.

In the nineties, Lightning Bolt emerged in Rhode Island with a parallel anarchic pulse and as a Derrida nightmare. A duo of drums and bass rigged with guitar and banjo strings, distorted to the point of collapse, repeating Eddie Van Halen tapping exercises like an infinite mantra. Masks made from old scraps, microphones fabricated from old phone parts pulled from the trash. Lyrics like Damo Suzuki of Can: without literal sense, loaded with everything. Lightning Bolt played in the center of the crowd, in ruined factories, erasing the line between band and audience. Minimalism as rebellion against overproduction, Philip Glass taken to the extreme of japanoise. The only American band that rivaled Boredoms or Ruins, a universe where Margiela confronts Comme des Garçons or Undercover. Listen to "Dracula Mountain" and feel the echo: the absence that roars.

Margiela disappeared for more than a decade. Few photos of him exist, in 2009 he left his maison without a note or goodbye. He evaporated, turning the exit into the supreme performance: the creator erases himself so the garment can speak. The ego dies and the work breathes. Think of J.D. Salinger holed up in New Hampshire, or Banksy without a face: the great void that amplifies the voice.

The paradox cuts like a knife: rejecting the show forged the ultimate spectacle and made it legendary. Interviews denied that fed the myth even more, photos evaded that inflated value in the attention market. In the Instagram era, where designers sell themselves as living logos and influencers dictate culture, his silence is obscenely effective. Anonymity as an indelible seal. The man who wanted to disappear became eternal by achieving it. Think of Morrissey when he announces a long awaited tour and then mysteriously cancels it.

Margiela saw the present as a tyrant that devours history to vomit hollow novelties. Garments as ethical acts: what else do we throw away? Traditions, knowledge, lives. Fashion was a visible front in the war against planned obsolescence, forgetting as a factory. Today, sustainability is talked about like a green sticker on logos, Margiela won this game thirty years ago, refusing the cycle of "produce-consume-destroy." Repair over buy, old over new, memory over hype. A used coat wasn’t trash: a canvas for those who see beauty in the broken, truth in the mended. In this era of fast fashion that poisons rivers, his legacy screams: true rebellion is to endure.