[category]
[title]
Maison Margiela’s first shop opened in a Tokyo house. That detail still says quite a lot.
In September 2000, the fashion house chose a quiet stretch of Ebisu for its first standalone store, moving into a traditional wooden home rather than one of the city’s established luxury shopping districts. When it relocated in 2006, it stayed in the neighbourhood, taking over a former electrical equipment factory a short walk away.
Twenty years at the current address is the starting point for the latest chapter of ‘MaisonMargiela/folders’, the house’s research and documentation project. Its new publication looks at what a fashion label leaves in a neighbourhood, and what it takes from the people who keep returning.
Released on November 5, the limited-edition zine gathers memories from longstanding staff, a history of the Tabi, interviews with local collectors and members of the Ebisu community, a photographic essay by Takashi Homma and a personal essay by Yoshikatsu Yamato. An original manga by Takehito Moriizumi and a booklet documenting a creative dialogue between artist Mio Suzuki and Les Manufactures Nationales – Sèvres & Mobilier National accompany it.
There’s something particularly fitting about treating the shop as an archive. Clothes have seasons; the people who work in a place, photograph it or walk past it every day tend to remember a different set of things.
That interest in what remains continues inside the store. ‘Unravelled Memory, Rewoven Future’, a Line 2 installation, brings Suzuki together with the French institution through tapestries that have been taken apart and rewoven. The material carries its previous life into a new form – a familiar Margiela instinct, translated into another medium.
The one-day zine newsstands around Ebisu have finished, but copies are being distributed at Maison Margiela Tokyo while stocks last. The publication is also available digitally through ‘MaisonMargiela/folders’, so the project remains accessible even if the physical copies have gone.