Maison Martin Margiela – Paper Bubbles

Martin Margiela is a Belgian fashion artist and graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts who in the last twenty years has worked with Hermes, Diesel and Jean Paul Gaultier. His haute couture collection “Artisanal” utilizes previously used clothes and materials to create interesting luxury pieces that require a large number of hours to create. As his book “20” describes, “the term luxury does not point to this use of valuable fabrics and materials, but instead refers to the number of labour hours invested in the production of a specific garment.”

Margiela’s fox stoles are made by combining paper balls which have been hand dyed using Chinese ink. The balls, like everything in the Artisanal collection, have been put together by hand. Each one of the stoles created took 55 hours to create and used a total of 2500 individual balls.

The use of the balls gives the stoles a lumpy bubbly texture that makes you want to reach out and touch it and the specifically chosen coloured areas create a relief landscape which draws the viewer’s eye around the piece.