Forget Laopu Gold – April Fool’s Day in China was all about Maison Margiela gold.
Taking a cruise on the outskirts of Shanghai, Glenn Martens, the brand’s creative director, on Wednesday unveiled the fashion house’s first runway show.
One of the latest Artisanal and ready-to-wear collections, Martens’ latest offering sought to reflect Shanghai’s business history while in true Martin Margiela fashion, it defied industry expectations with an unconventional space.
“It’s exciting for the f–king city of dishes,” said Martens, who arrived in town a few weeks before the show.
Bringing the collection to China proved to be an adventure in itself. Although the clothes made of absurd fabrics, such as beeswax masks and porcelain objects, caused a little confusion in the culture, the 70-odd look arrived in Shanghai intact, and the team spent two weeks in the city to complete the list – the designer deliberately avoided 74, as the number four is considered bad in Chinese fengshui culture.
Under the golden moon and amidst the drums and Nick Cave’s lyric of “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” the fully clothed models walked with tight steps, making soft sounds and small sounds while the look was made of unusual materials.
“Actually I like beeswax, it’s poetry,” Martens enthuses – a woven mask, waxed and cracked, was one of the starting points for the Artisanal group; it was painted with a Victorian mourning dress and covered in beeswax. This treatment was a subtle reference to its historical use as a binding agent as far back as the Warring States Period of ancient China from 475 to 221 BC.
“The place where Martin Margiela started was actually a department store,” Martens explained. He is the one who really made the plastic bag a luxury.
Rethinking luxury by combining finds, elegance and ready-to-wear is what made Margiela a commercial success, and has become a tradition that drives the creative direction of the Martens house.
For the first time in years, both Artisanal and ready-to-wear groups worked on the same project together. The Shanghai fashion show was made up of 20 percent Artisanal dresses, which were made available to order after the show.
Elsewhere, Edwardian porcelain dolls and their decayed patina emerged as another important source of inspiration – a reference made prominently including an Edwardian dress made of pieces of porcelain bound in organza. Translated into a ready-to-wear style, the idea became an A-line dress with a porcelain-like sheen, which is achieved through air cleaning, screening and printing.
“Each hole has a different dimension, you get more depth – one of it [Martin Margiela] great ideas too,” said Martens.
Creating an “institutional collection” was where Martens’ passion lay. Like a mad scientist, he dropped the white latex paint on top, then peeled back the edges to reveal a large mess. One such garment was covered with gold leaf that fluttered as the model walked. For Martens, a very heavy – and expensive – dress is built with 150,000 mini-star stitches, which have the same head and spill over the model’s body. The final dress, a five-meter sculpture from the Marché de Saint-Ouen, was combined with a column dress, making the proud humble.
Another Artisanal period – informally “taffeta vomit” – was observed as a cascading dress made of 22 meters of fabric. Handcrafted with 400 details and about 200 hours of work, it was a single drape that created a living picture.
The offering relied on tailoring and technical experimentation in fashion, resulting in a curated collection full of retro-styled coats and leather outerwear. Colorful dresses broke up the tight fabric, while straight jersey, some thin, some stiff enough to sculpt the body, played on Martin Margiela’s love of “second skin.”
The jersey, which served as an arrow for ready-made suits or coats or combined together heavy goods with rotten quality, was one of the things that customers liked during the year of the great sales of March, according to the Martens group.
New accessories, including heels with double cutouts on top, or shoes with square toes that seemed to float in mid-air, easily spoke to fans of Tabi shoes who crave podiatric visions. A new style of bag, called “The Link,” will debut in the market, with a leather strap wrapped in a large size bag.
“It’s true that Margiela will never be an elegant brand, but it can be elegant in a Margiela way – you don’t play with him,” Martens said of the way he combines his personal items in the heritage house.
International stars – including Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Blue Pongtiwat Tangwancharoen, Mark Lee, Lee You Mi and Zion T, and local stars such as Mavis Fan, Janine Chang, Hsu Kuang-han, Laurinda Ho, Bai Baihe, Cheng Lei, Hu Xianxu, Zhan Xuan, Zhang Xincheng of China’s first Ninzo Ohong, Zhang Xincheng and Ninzo Ohong Ohong. founder and chairman of OTB Group, Margiela’s parent company.
“We want to celebrate the brand and the Chinese market. The Chinese market is a bit difficult right now, but the only way for us is to establish ties with the Chinese people – we have to be together, we want the Chinese people to think of Margiela as a domestic brand. Many brands are making products, but we are doing real innovation with Glenn,” Rosso told WWD after the show. Maison Margiela’s sales rose by 8.4 percent in 2025, recording the largest growth among the group’s names.
With the task of changing the market perception of this brand, Martens will follow his pilot debut with a series of activities under the title “Maison Margiela/Folders,” to convey the story of the collection more than the game.
Taking the Yandang Road in Shanghai, a one-week exhibition, free to the general public, will be dedicated to Artisanal couture pieces from 1989 to 2025.
“It would be nice to have people who don’t know what fashion is, to look at a plastic bag and think it’s possible,” Martens noted.
The exhibition in Beijing will explore the theme of anonymity, the exhibition in Chengdu will show the Tabi shoe collection of 10 enthusiasts of Maison Margiela, and a two-day immersion experience in Shenzhen will allow local people to bring their clothes and transform them with white paint, as the house is making chairs, lights-8 from 18.
Events were teased with a Dropbox link and a dedicated WeChat Mini app, which dropped in February. Fans of this genre can find files that contain detailed images of the archive, teasers for shows, the band’s tour, model call times, and what is sent to China for various events.
For Martens, all the publicity – from the air show to the subsequent shows – serves a deliberate purpose: To return to what he described as “primitive ways of thinking.”
“The craftsman has been infused into ready-to-wear, and sewing has always been one of our hero programs,” he said. The difference, of course, is that we now tend to wear more clothes than in the 1990s.
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