How Do You Make Margiela Sneakers More Luxurious? Duct Tape, Staples & Dirt
Maison Margiela has not only taken the liberty of pre-destroying its signature sneaker, but it’s also gone ahead and pre-repaired the shoe. The Margiela Replica sneaker, a luxurious Italian-made remake of adidas’ 1970s German army trainer, now has industrial duct tape sloppily strapped around the forefoot, while some panels of the shoe’s pre-muddied suede are ripped in half and stapled to the plush calfskin leather base.
It's a new shoe made to appear as though it’s been through several wars, which is kinda Margiela’s love language.
The brand’s longstanding fascination with pre-worn and repaired goods led to the “Loved to Death” sneaker earlier this year, a Converse-esque design carefully deconstructed with frayed-edged paneling and hand-stitched reinforcements.
Go back even further, to 2018, and you find the Maison Margiela Fusion, a chunky dad shoe painstakingly handmade with glue spilling out from the sides and, once again, duct-taped panels of fabric.
Over the years, Maison Margiela has gone to great lengths to make luxurious shoes as dirty and destroyed-looking as possible. Why? Well, in the case of the “Loved to Death” sneaker, it was a tribute to the stories imbued into a worn-to-death sneaker — or as the brand put it, a “manifestation of ephemeral memories,” — and the $1600 Fusion sneaker was “a condensed index of the training shoes that are part of the collective today,” meaning a history of dad shoes smashed into one hodgepodge dad shoe.
In this case, the scuffed and duct-taped Replica shoe is, based on Margiela’s website, an ode to its love of repaired (read: well-loved) items. But there’s also something undeniably subversive about shoes that look like unkept beaters but cost $890 — that’s $100 more than a pair of regular clean white Margiela Replicas.
Duct-taped and purposefully cooked sneakers don’t look expensive, even if the high-end craftsmanship behind them means they are expensive. And that’s the fun game Margiela is playing.
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