Maison Margiela Co-Ed Spring-Summer 2024 Collection

Inheritance is an act of transmutation. When a belonging is passed down from one generation to another, its geneticsare modified and advanced. For the Co-Ed Spring-Summer 2024 Collection, Maison Margiela stages a searchfor individual truth reflected in the generational adaptation of an inherited wardrobe. Evoking the memory of oneage through the radical eyes of the next, Creative Director John Galliano triggers a chemical reaction between erasand attitudes founded in a flashback narrative imagined within the Maison’s ongoing chronicle of the charactersCount and Hen.

In the foyer of Maison Margiela, projected imagery of a transatlantic ship towering over the roofs of a twentieth-centuryEnglish port city foreshadows the show. On its passage to America, an adolescent meeting between the parents ofCount and Hen unfolds: one, the son of an impoverished aristocratic line; the other, the daughter of an industrial familyof pretence. The scene informs a collection founded in the voyage’s steely climate, its characters, and a cargo loadedwith travelling trunks full of clothes which will ultimately end up in the adaptive hands of their future descendants.

Illustrating the generational impulse for customisation that reflects one’s contemporary truth, dresses employthe practice of exfoliage. Here, the top layer of the bustier is ripped away to reveal its inside construction, loweredover the skirt and laminated with relief-effect. It mirrors the new technique of pressage in which dresses and shirtsare laminated across drapes and creases, leaving unvarnished reliefs as if flattened by the pressure of a suitcase.The spirit of adaptation infuses dresses with shiny fragments of bows, a motif similarly exercised in misfit eveningsilhouettes, spontaneously customised with tape or work-in-progress stitching.

In a study of inherited tailoring, blazers imbued with the memory of sports cloths coolly draped around the neckimitate the nonchalant body-language observed in archival imagery of mauvais garçons. Exercised through cutting,they reflect the unconscious gestures with which we naturally imprint the garments we wear: the shrug of a jacket,the cowing of a pocket, the runkling of a hem. The Maison’s Rorschach cutting – which conjures pareidolic outlinesof familiar characters – evolves into Rorschach dotting in an organza skirt treated with printed pied de poule andlamination, a process echoed in a velour coat.

Outerwear and suits fuse the tropes of the masculine wardrobe with the classic grammar of the feminine wardrobe,culminating in coats underpinned with sculptural basques. Dancing-hem culottes re-appropriate hacked-up mid-century dresses, a form language reverberated in the sculptural beetle backs of a denim car coat and coats withadapted maritime collars. Tabi brogues and Tabi spectator shoes are interpreted in several forms. Deck shoes nodat the narrative’s premise. Shopping bags, bowling bags and vase bags adapt the Rorschach dots, while hats mimicmid-century shapes through naïve construction.