Feature: THE BIG PICTURE - Exhibition - Maison Martin Margiela '20', The Somerset House Embankment Galleries

Published: 12 August, 2010

ONE of contemporary fashion’s most groundbreaking designers is being celebrated at a major exhibition at Somerset House. 

Maison Martin Margiela ‘20’: The Exhibition explores the work of Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela, a graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts who worked as design assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier before showing his first collection under his own label in 1988.  

Over the past 20 years, he has been bringing to bear an imaginative, “deconstructivist” approach influenced by the Modernist movement and diametrically opposed to the “power dressing” of the 1980s. This included the use of a monochromatic palette, outsized garments, non-traditional fabrics and recycled materials. In the case of the piece pictured, recycled gloves are used to create a piece of clothing.

Following the success of recent exhibitions SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution and Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, the show explores Margiela’s artistic and conceptual approach to fashion and continues Somerset House’s commitment to showcasing the world’s most celebrated creative talents across fashion, art and design. 

Conceived in close collaboration with Maison Martin Margiela and curated by the Mode Museum, Antwerp, the exhibition – which incorporates film, photography, video and installations – is making its London debut, and is specially reconfigured for the Embankment Galleries following critical acclaim at the MoMu, Antwerp and Haus der Kunst, Munich last year. 

• Maison Martin Margiela ‘20’: The Exhibition, Somerset House Embankment Galleries, Strand, WC2, until September 5, Open daily 10am-6pm, late night opening Thursdays until 8pm, tickets £6, concessions £5, under-12s free, 020 7845 4600, www.somersethouse.org.uk/margiela