PORTRAIT OF AN ABSENCE: MARTIN MARIELA'S ARCHIVE COMES TO PARIS

    all images courtesy of ©Maurice Auction

Martin Margiela was born in the Belgian town of Genk in 1957, trained at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and spent four years, beginning in 1984, assisting Jean Paul Gaultier before opening his own house with his business partner, Jenny Meirens. Their first serious decision as a label read almost like a riddle: how does a fashion house announce itself through silence alone? Their answer was a small white label, sewn on with four visible stitches, deliberately loose, designed to be cut away entirely; remove it, and a garment belonged only to its wearer. That single gesture, refusal disguised as design, set the tone for the following twenty years: veiled models, interviews conducted by fax, a documentary that let his voice speak while his face stayed hidden. Now, an unusual reversal is under way. The man who spent a career erasing his own signature has agreed to let two hundred of his most private possessions carry it for him, publicly, in Paris, under a gavel. 

In Paris, Maurice Auction and Kerry Taylor Auctions will offer around 195 lots drawn from Margiela's personal archive; objects kept rather than displayed, used rather than photographed. Organisers describe the sale as the first occasion a living creator has placed such material directly into an auction house's hands. It plays out as an unguarded afternoon, arriving from a man who spent an entire career keeping such afternoons locked away. 

A certain irony sits inside the timing. The sale falls on 9 July 2026, at two in the afternoon, precisely as Paris turns its attention toward the newest ideas of Haute Couture Week, and this quieter counter-current surfaces instead; the record of ideas already lived through, offered by an alliance across the Channel represented respectively by Salomé Pirson and fashion specialist Alex Baddeley, who now stage such sales twice a year, writing fashion history through objects rather than runways. What they will offer spans twenty-four years of a single hand at work; from 1984, when Margiela's earliest efforts took shape for La Canette d'Or in Antwerp, through 2008, when he stepped away from the house carrying his name, with a small handful of later additions made during the pandemic years, as if even solitude eventually asked to be catalogued. 

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

 

click on the image and let the music hold you

FORMS OF DESIRE

 

      a personal image made from the exhibition

March 8th, afternoon light

Palazzo Reale. The doors open into a different kind of church.

I went alone. I always do with artists I love this much. Solitude lets me move at my own rhythm, return to what calls me, and stand as long as I need without accounting for anyone else's time.

Forms of Desire - the title already knows what I came for. What I've been circling toward. The pull is stronger than reason, older than language.

The exhibition (find some photos here) doesn't move chronologically. It moves the way longing moves, elliptical, returning, deepening with each pass.

The early collages. Bodies torn from magazines, reassembled according to a grammar I'm still learning to read. Mapplethorpe, before he mastered light, when desire was still something raw, unrefined, showing its teeth.

I step close. Close enough to see where his hands made choices, where scissors met paper, where he decided what stays and what gets cut away. The violence of it. The tenderness.

My pulse slows. The city outside fades. There is only this: standing in front of evidence that someone else felt this, too. This needs to take the world apart and put it back together in the shape of what you want.

SCARAB

    image courtesy ©Sophie Buhai

 

Rooted in ancient symbolism and shaped through a contemporary lens, this pair of sculptural earrings reflects Sophie Buhai’s devotion to form, material, and meaning. Crafted in sterling silver, each piece carries a polished onyx drop whose profound black surface holds depth, gravity, and a composed allure. 

Drawing from the scarab’s enduring associations with renewal and continuity, the design unfolds in an elongated silhouette that moves with intention. As they fall from the ear, the form traces a measured rhythm, transforming gesture into presence and ornament into expression. It is here that the Scarab Drop Earrings in Onyx reveal their character: balanced, symbolic, and unmistakably sculptural. 

THE DIALOGUE OF DESIRE

 

    original image and video courtesy ©Tom Ford

Haider Ackermann's Spring/Summer 2026 collection for Tom Ford opened with three models in patent leather moving slowly across a midnight blue lacquered floor. A warm green trench coat with a popped collar, a deep mauve jacket-and-skirt set, a black hooded ensemble, each piece glistening like water under moonlight. This opening gesture announced the collection's central proposition: seduction rendered through careful calibration between exposure and restraint. 

The midnight swim inspiration revealed itself gradually. Patent leather carried laser-cut perforations that suggested mesh, creating patterns of revealed skin beneath. Bias-cut silk dresses moved like liquid. Satin suits appeared in unexpected pastels: lime green, baby pink, mint, pool blue, and orange. David Bowie's stripped-down, a cappella version of "Heroes" filled the space, the song's yearning transformed into an intimate whisper as models walked slowly, often in pairs, making eye contact with each other and the audience. 

Ackermann's technical mastery showed in the details. Wire construction held strapless gowns suspended as though from invisible threads. A lapis blue gown with cap sleeves featured a cutout back plunging low enough to eliminate undergarments entirely, yet the precision of construction read as classical sculpture rather than provocation. Shawl draping appeared on evening pieces. A mint-and-black draped gown created visual tension through two-tone contrast. Slip dresses carried trim of laser-cut leather lace, juxtaposing the delicate against the strong.