Forget Laopu Gold — April Fool’s Day in China was all about Maison Margiela gold.
Taking over a shipping container dock on the outskirts of Shanghai, Glenn Martens, the brand’s creative director, on Wednesday unveiled the fashion house’s first traveling runway show.
A hybrid of its latest Artisanal and coed ready-to-wear collections, Martens’ latest runway proposition sought to reflect Shanghai’s trade history while in true Martin Margiela fashion, subvert industry expectations with an atypical venue.
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“It’s an adventure to the f–king city of containers,” said Martens, who arrived in town several weeks ahead of the show.
Bringing the collection to China proved to be an adventure in itself. Though garments made of ambiguous source materials, such as beeswax masks and porcelain elements, caused minor confusion at customs, the 70-odd looks ultimately arrived in Shanghai intact, with the team spending two weeks in the city to finalize the lineup — the designer deliberately avoided 74, as the number four is considered bad fengshui in traditional Chinese culture.
Under a golden moon and amid drumming sounds and a poetic rendition of Nick Cave’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” fully masked models walked in tense steps, making soft rustling and tiny clashing sounds as the looks were made of unconventional materials.
“I’m really into beeswaxing, it’s poetic,” Martens enthused — a laced mask, waxed and cracked, was one of the starting points for the Artisanal lineup; it was paired with a Victorian-era mourning dress also coated in beeswax. The treatment was a subtle reference to its historical use as a binding agent as early as the Warring States period in ancient China from 475 to 221 B.C.
“The starting point of Martin Margiela was really the thrift store,” Martens explained. “He’s the one who really made the plastic bag luxury. What mattered was how you actually looked at things and change the perception of it.”
Rethinking luxury by blending found objects, craftsmanship with ready-to-wear was what made Margiela a commercial success, and it has become an ethos that drives Martens’ creative direction at the house.
For the first time in years, both the Artisanal and ready-to-wear teams worked on a single project together. The Shanghai runway show was comprised of 20 percent Artisanal gowns, which were made available for order after the show.
Elsewhere, Edwardian porcelain dolls and their decaying patina emerged as another key source of inspiration — the reference materialized in standout looks that included an Edwardian dress constructed from porcelain shards bound with organza. Translated into ready-to-wear, the idea became an A-line dress with a porcelain-like sheen, achieved through airbrushing, scanning and printing techniques.
“Every single layer has a bit of a different dimension, you get more depth — one of his [Martin Margiela] great ideas again,” Martens said.
Creating an “institutional collection” was where Martens’ ambition lay. Like a mad scientist, he dropped latex white paint over-embellished ballgowns, then peeled off the edges to reveal an opulent mess. Another such gown was covered in gold leaf that flicked away as the model moved. For Martens, a more labor-intensive — and expensive — gown was constructed of 150,000 mini-star stickers, complete with a matching headpiece and spilling onto the model’s body. The finale dress, a five-meter painting sourced from Marché de Saint-Ouen, was reassembled into a column dress, making the humble majestic.
Another Artisanal moment — unofficially dubbed “a vomit of taffeta” — was realized as a cascading gown made with 22 meters of fabric. Hand-sculpted with 400 points and nearly 200 hours of work, it was a singular drape that formed a living sculpture.
That offering leaned into retro tailoring and technical experimentation in ready-to-wear, resulting in a streamlined collection full of retro tailored jackets and leather outerwear. Flowy pleated dresses broke up the austere lineup, while tailored stretchy jersey, some sheer, some stiffened as to sculpt the body, played with Martin Margiela’s love of “the second skin.”
The jersey, which acted as darts for tailored suits or jackets or fused together heavier material that had a decayed quality, were among buyers’ favorites during the March wholesale season, according to Martens’ team.
New accessories, including heels with double cutouts at the upper, or square-toed boots that seemed to float in mid-air, easily spoke to Tabi shoe fans craving podiatric illusions. A new bag style, dubbed “The Link,” will make its market debut, featuring bonded leather wrapped around a generously sized pouch.
“Of course Margiela will never be a sexy brand, but it can be sexy in a very Margiela way — you don’t play with her,” Martens said of how he fuses his personal quirks into the legacy house.
Global stars — including Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Blue Pongtiwat Tangwancharoen, Mark Lee, Lee You Mi and Zion T, and local celebrities such as Mavis Fan, Janine Chang, Hsu Kuang-han, Laurinda Ho, Bai Baihe, Cheng Lei, Hu Xianxu, Zhan Xuan, Zhang Xincheng and Chinese Olympian Ning Zhongyan — shared the front row with Renzo Rosso, founder and chairman of OTB Group, Margiela’s parent company.
“We want to celebrate the brand with the Chinese market. The Chinese market is a little difficult now, but the only way, for us, is to create a synergy with the Chinese people — we have to be together, we want Chinese people to think of Margiela as a home brand. Most brands are doing products, but we are doing real creativity with Glenn,” Rosso told WWD after the show. Sales at Maison Margiela were up 8.4 percent in 2025, registering the most significant growth among the group’s labels.
Tasked with reshaping market perceptions of the brand, Martens will follow his runway debut with a series of activations under the title “Maison Margiela/Folders,” extending the collection’s narrative beyond the catwalk.
Taking over the street of Yandang Road in Shanghai, a one-week exhibition, free to the general public, will be dedicated to Artisanal couture pieces from 1989 through 2025.
“It would be fun to just have people that have no clue what fashion is, for them to to look at a plastic bag, and think anything is possible,” Martens observed.
An exhibition in Beijing will delve into the topic of anonymity, an exhibition in Chengdu will showcase the Tabi shoe collections of 10 Maison Margiela enthusiasts, and a two-day immersive experience in Shenzhen will let locals bring their own garments and transform them with white paint, as the house has been doing to chairs, lamps, you-name-it since 1988.
The events were teased via a Dropbox link and a dedicated WeChat Mini program, which dropped in February. Fans of the brand can access the files that featured detailed archival imagery, teasers for exhibitions, team itinerary, call-time for models, and what’s being shipped to China for various events.
For Martens, the whole rollout — from the runway show to the subsequent exhibitions — serves a deliberate purpose: To return to what he described as “the original ways of thinking.”
“The artisanal has always been embedded within the ready-to-wear, and tailoring has always been one of our hero programs,” he said. “The difference, of course, is that we are now much more gown-oriented than in the 1990s.”