Maison Margiela has opened its first store in the region at Kuwait’s The Avenue Mall. The new space is fully furnished to coincide with the visual language that Margiela has become synonymous with under John Galliano.
The store’s design follows the same design previewed at the gypsum-cast set at the Artisanal Autumn/Winter 2018 show. The interior and facades of the store are fitted out to interpret Margiela’s iconoclast codes, with an abstract yet inviting environment that follows Galliano’s notion of appropriating the inappropriate.
Margiela’s debut store in the middle east will be a 210-square meter boutique that will house all of Maison Margiela’s complete ranges, including men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections, accessories, shoes, and leather goods, as well as fragrances and jewellery.
The store’s interior is where the real artistic direction comes into play. Pivotal architectural structures in the form of walls and columns appear as detached objects. At the same time, artisanal furnishings reflect and alter ideas of familiarity, a phenomenon that has been threaded through Margiela’s collections in recent years. The boundary-pushing and altered sense of familiarity, drawn from ideas of dressing in haste – a concept native to Margiela’s vocabulary- extends to familiar shapes that skew in form, leaning and folding around demarcations of space.
Surfaces of the plaster walls and columns, which have been individually hand-cast in textile molds, give the impression of the texture of the fabric, sculpting dents, and evoke the notion of irreproducible hand-spun tactility. The store ultimately serves to encourage the human touch that created it.
