The most intimate fashion sale of the decade reveals not just garments, but the mind of one of fashion’s greatest revolutionaries.
Fashion loves the word archive. The industry uses it constantly: archival pieces, archival references, archival collections. Entire careers now seem built on revisiting, quoting or reselling the past. But very few designers have shaped fashion history as profoundly as Martin Margiela, and even fewer have remained as elusive.
For nearly four decades, Martin Margiela has occupied a singular place in fashion culture: simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. His ideas transformed the industry. His face disappeared from it. The split-toe Tabi. The exposed lining. The oversized silhouette. The blank label. The deconstructed garment. The anonymous designer. Entire generations, from Demna and Glenn Martens to Jonathan Anderson and countless younger designers, have worked in the long shadow of concepts Margiela introduced decades ago.
This July in Paris, the designer will put part of his personal archive up for sale. Organized by Maurice Auction in collaboration with Kerry Taylor Auctions, the event gathers more than 200 lots spanning the years between 1984 and 2008, from his earliest Antwerp experiments to his departure from Maison Martin Margiela. It is the first time a living designer has directly collaborated with an auction house to disperse pieces from his own archive. A historic gesture for a creator who spent much of his career refusing interviews, avoiding publicity and systematically dismantling the mythology of authorship itself.
Before the Maison, There Was the Dream
Among the most fascinating lots is Margiela’s first “Dossier” from 1987, a handmade portfolio created while searching for Italian manufacturers before the launch of Maison Martin Margiela. Part sketchbook, part manifesto, it visualized a fashion house that did not yet exist. “In the beginning, when I searched for a manufacturer in Italy, I had to visualize the fashion I would like to create,” recalls Margiela. “This dossier reflected very well the, by then unknown, fashion house.”
Its significance goes far beyond its modest estimate. Created a year before the legendary Spring/Summer 1989 debut show, it captures the moment when Margiela’s deconstructivist vision existed only on paper. Few documents offer such a direct glimpse into the birth of a fashion movement that would later influence everyone from Demna to Jonathan Anderson.
The White Coat That Became a Uniform
Few visual signatures are as closely associated with Margiela as white cotton. One of the sale’s most symbolic pieces is the designer’s own white atelier coat, worn between 1988 and 2008. While often mistaken for a laboratory coat, it was inspired by the traditional blouses worn in French couture houses. “I was interested in the contrast of the traditional and the progressive,” Martin Margiela explains. The garment became a manifesto in itself. At a time when luxury fashion was increasingly dominated by celebrity designers, logos and personal branding, Margiela’s anonymous white coat erased hierarchy. Everyone in the studio wore the same uniform. The designer disappeared into the collective.
The Veil That Changed Fashion Imagery
Another highlight is an original prototype of the face-covering veil that became one of the defining images of early Margiela shows. “All the attention is purely focused on the clothes without any distraction of the person’s face,” he explains. “It created almost an abstraction.” Today, obscuring a model’s identity is commonplace on runways. In the late 1980s it was revolutionary. Margiela challenged fashion’s obsession with beauty, celebrity and individual identity decades before discussions around anonymity and image culture entered mainstream discourse.
The Birth of the Tabi
If one lot is likely to trigger bidding wars, it is undoubtedly the pair of Graffiti Tabi boots from 1991. Originally inspired by the split-toe footwear worn by Japanese workers, the Tabi has become one of the most recognizable shoes in fashion history. When it debuted in 1988, however, the reaction was far from enthusiastic. “Nobody liked them,” Martin Margiela remembers. “But I continued to present them season after season.” This particular pair is even more remarkable. Exhibited at the Palais Galliera’s landmark 1991 exhibition La Mode Selon Ses Créateurs, visitors unexpectedly began writing directly onto the white-painted boots. Margiela embraced the intervention. Nearly forty years later, the Tabi remains in production, an almost unparalleled feat in contemporary fashion. These graffiti-covered examples are less shoes than relics of a cultural revolution.
The Telephone and the Tyranny of White
One of the sale’s most charming objects is a white-painted rotary telephone from Margiela’s personal office. At the end of the 1980s, black industrial furniture and Japanese minimalism dominated avant-garde interiors. Margiela deliberately chose the opposite. “I felt that I had to be different by choosing the opposite, the colour white,” he says. “Everything had to be roughly painted white.” Walls, furniture, televisions and telephones were all transformed. The white aesthetic would become one of the strongest visual codes of the Maison, extending from boutiques to packaging and labels. This humble telephone reveals how deeply Margiela understood branding long before the concept became ubiquitous.
Barbie, Miniatures and the Joy of Scale
The sale also sheds light on a lesser-known side of Margiela’s creativity: his fascination with miniatures. Among the most touching lots are the Barbie dolls dressed in miniature versions of looks from his Autumn/Winter 1989 collection. Originally created for an exhibition, they disappeared for decades before Margiela painstakingly recreated them during the Covid lockdown. “As a kid they were my models,” he recalls. “I loved to make dresses for them.” The same playful spirit appears in the miniature recreations of iconic Margiela garments produced between 2018 and 2024. These tiny objects reveal a surprisingly emotional relationship with his own legacy. “They are even more touching than the actual sizes were,” he says.
The Hermès Years
Perhaps the greatest revelation of the sale is the inclusion of the wardrobe of Margiela’s mother, Léa Bouchet. Around sixty garments, shoes, bags and accessories from his tenure at Hermès between 1997 and 2003 will be offered. Fashion history often remembers Margiela as the radical deconstructionist. Yet his years at Hermès demonstrated another side of his genius: restraint. “My definition of luxury is to balance quality, comfort and timelessness,” he explains.
Many of the objects presented here have become cult classics. The Vareuse shirt, inspired by traditional sailors’ tops, remains one of the most influential garments of modern luxury dressing. The Double Tour watch transformed the way watches are worn and became an industry-wide phenomenon. “It became a best-seller until today,” Margiela notes. “Needless to say that all big brands copied it instantly.” The sale also includes examples of the famous Clochette necklace, early Hermès footwear, knitwear ensembles and the rare Initial bag from Autumn/Winter 2002/03, now regarded by collectors as one of the purest expressions of Margiela’s Hermès philosophy.
An Exhibition Designed as an Unwrapping
Before the auction comes an exhibition conceived by longtime friend and collaborator Bob Verhelst. Installed in a venue inspired by an early twentieth-century workshop, the presentation is imagined as a gradual unwrapping of the archive itself. Most of the objects have never been publicly shown. Visitors will encounter them almost as if they had just emerged from storage, emphasizing their materiality, fragility and emotional resonance. It feels particularly fitting for Margiela. Throughout his career he dismantled garments to reveal what lay beneath. Here, he performs the same operation on his own history.
Information
Exhibition : 4–8 July 2026, 11am–6pm, 71 rue de la Fontaine au Roi, 75011 Paris
Free entry by reservation via Mauriceauction.com/
Auction : 9 July 2026, 2pm
Catalogue : Available from mid-June 2026
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