Maison Margiela And Gentle Monster Crush The Frame
The Paris couture house and the Seoul eyewear label return on 29 October with 68 styles built around deconstruction and a run of pop-ups in eight cities. Gabriel Winter reports.
A fourth outing for any brand partnership tends to carry the risk of feeling like a contractual obligation, so it says a lot about how well Maison Margiela and Gentle Monster understand each other that their new collection, which lands this Thursday, looks stranger and more unsettled than anything they have put out together before.
The pair have chosen deconstruction as the organising idea, which comes naturally to a house that has spent almost four decades taking garments apart to see how they work, and Gentle Monster, a label that built its name in Seoul by treating its stores more like installations than shops, has given that idea plenty of room to run.
Across 43 sunglasses and 25 optical frames, some of the most familiar eyewear shapes have been pushed out of proportion while others look as though they have been crushed underfoot and put back on the shelf regardless, and the oversized styles are so large that they hide most of the face while actually widening what the wearer can see.
At the other end of the range, narrow upswept frames come wrapped tightly in leather, and the four white stitches long associated with Margiela’s blank label sit at the temples throughout, with the slimmer frames carrying a newer version in which the stitches appear to float loose over the edge of the frame.
The campaign film is directed by Alex Prager, whose photographs and films have always found something uncanny in crowds and ordinary afternoons, and it follows a woman who has ten minutes to reach someone as she tears across a city that keeps rearranging itself around her, passing a cast of characters who each wear a different silhouette from the collection.
To mark the launch, pop-up spaces open on the same day in eight cities stretching from Seoul to the Marais in Paris, each built from irregular structures designed to look deliberately unfinished, while Seoul also hosts a one-off performance in which the choreographer Damien Jalet and the artist Ian McMahon take the theme of deconstruction and work it out through bodies, objects and light moving against one another in the space.
The Maison Margiela x Gentle Monster collection is released on 29 October on gentlemonster.com, with London left off the pop-up list this time around.
