Correspondence No. 01 Martin Margiela
Anonymity as art.
I didn’t know who you were when I first saw what you’d done. There was no logo.
No face.
Just stitches, four white ones, like a secret language I didn’t speak yet, but somehow understood.
No faces. Masks that told every single story of those around us.
I had stumbled into something I wasn’t supposed to see, in a way. A jacket turned inside out. A sleeve that didn’t behave. A marvelous golden stitched dressed that spoke my name.
I didn’t know you were a designer. I thought you were a ghost.
The kind that leaves traces in fabric instead of footprints. The kind that rewrites a dress by erasing it.
Looking back, I think it was the first time fashion made me feel quiet.You unsettled me, beautifully.
You unsettled me, beautifully. You unsettled me, not because of what I saw,
but because of what I didn’t.
You unsettled me because no one else let me look at the backstage, and call it the point.
You unsettled me because no one else said, “this too is beauty: the undone, the overlooked, the almost.”
You made me want to protect clothes like memories, like the experiences that change something.
I’ve read that your clothes were made for women of a certain mindset—not a certain age or shape. I like to believe I am one of them. Not because I fit, but because I understand. Because I, too, am learning to listen to silence as form.
This letter is late, I know.
But your work didn’t demand to be seen right away.
It waited.
Like all important things do.
And like a ghost, you parted. Not in spectacle, but in bold demure. How could four stitches hold such mystery, such beauty, such precision?
How could you not be my favorite designer, when I wept and felt a tremor down my spine the very first time I saw your work?
Still Writing: This Time in Form
I wasn’t supposed to reply. I had already written. But I kept imagining what you might, perhaps say back. And you replied, not in words but in texture, in tension, in undone seams.
So I drew.
Not to continue the conversation, but to inhabit it differently.To ask again, through silhouette.
So, Martin, what do you think about them?