A Margiela Nerd Documented a Margiela Nerd's Dream Archive
The front cover of 0 0 10, a new 720-page book dedicated to Maison Martin Margiela, couldn’t be more fitting: It is simply a plain white page.
Just as Margiela’s first product labels were plain white strips of fabric, early garments were covered in white paint, and staff dress in white lab coats, even this book’s cover is an ode to a quintessential Martin Margiela code.
The inside pages are as straightforward as they are rich. There, you find a 688-piece Martin Margiela archive from Tokyo vintage store Laila, each item photographed against a white background.
There are 688 artisanal pieces altogether, split between two volumes. 446 items are from Margiela’s artisanal and défilé women's line, labeled “0” according to the brand’s numbering system introduced in 1997. The remaining 242 pieces are menswear (line 10) and men’s artisanal (also line 0), thus giving the book its name.
Countless grails from Martin Margiela’s time at his revolutionary eponymous house feature across the extensive collection.
These range from a whitevest made of paper-mache’d advertising posters from Spring/Summer 1990, one of which is in The Met’s permanent collection, to a Fall/Winter 2004 bomber jacket reconstructed from vintage leather German Air Force outerwear and a Fall/Winter 2005 blouson that upcycled inside-out wigs.
printings.jp, a publisher and vintage bookstore owned by Laila, documented and photographed every item over several years and is taking pre-orders of the resulting book till March 21 for ¥32,000 (about $210).
The expansive book joins a wide array of literature dedicated to Martin Margiela, one of the 20th century’s most influential designers, covering everything from his days as Hermès’ creative director to the Fashion Museum Antwerp’s 20th anniversary exhibition on the designer in 2008. The difference is that prior publications focused on Margiela’s boundary-breaking shows and never-seen-before ‘90s imagery while 0 0 10 is solely interested in the products.
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