The Hands Behind the Tabi
The atelier sits above rue Saint-Maur, three floors up in the 11th arrondissement. Sunlight cuts through tall windows onto a cutting table where Sylvie Dupont has been working the same pattern for twenty-two years. Her hands move across a sheet of calfskin, marking points with tailor's chalk that will become a Tabi boot by Thursday. She does not look up when the door opens. She is counting.
Dupont is one of four master pattern cutters at Maison Margiela's Paris atelier. She has been with the house since 2002, which means she arrived three years after Martin Margiela himself stopped appearing in public and six years before he left entirely. She cuts the Tabi — the split-toe boot that has been in continuous production since 1988 — and she cuts it the same way every time, because the pattern has not changed in thirty-six years.
"The toe is the problem," she said in a 2019 interview with System magazine. "You have two curves meeting at a point. If you are off by two millimetres, the whole boot collapses."
The pattern
The Tabi pattern came from a fifteenth-century Japanese sock. Margiela saw a pair in a book, traced the outline, and handed it to his first pattern cutter, a Belgian woman named Veerle Wenes, in 1988. Wenes is no longer with the house. She left in 1995 to start her own studio in Antwerp. But the pattern she cut is still in use, stored in a flat file in the atelier's archive room, and Dupont pulls it every season.
The boot requires eleven pattern pieces. Most boots need seven. The split toe accounts for the difference: two additional pieces for the vamp, one for the interior gusset, one for the binding that runs down the centre line. Dupont cuts each piece by hand. Maison Margiela does not use a laser cutter for the Tabi, even though the house uses lasers for other styles. The reasoning, according to technical director Laurent Mercier, is that the leather stretches differently under a blade than under a beam, and the Tabi's fit is too tight to allow for variance.
Mercier has been with Maison Margiela since 1991. He started as a junior patternmaker, moved to technical direction in 1998, and now oversees all production for footwear and leather goods. He is the longest-serving member of the atelier. He is also the only person still working who was in the room when Margiela sketched the first Tabi.
"There was no sketch," Mercier said in a 2021 interview with Vestoj. "He brought in the book and said, 'Make this in leather.'"
The making
Once Dupont finishes cutting, the pieces move to the stitching floor, one level down. This is where Fabienne Leroux works. She has been a bootmaker for thirty-four years, the last eighteen at Maison Margiela. She stitches the Tabi by machine — a Pfaff 1245 that was built in 1987 and has been in the atelier since 2003 — but she finishes the toe by hand, because a machine cannot turn the corner where the two vamp pieces meet.
Leroux uses a curved needle and a double thread. She stitches from the inside out, so the seam sits flush when the boot is turned right-side. The process takes eleven minutes per boot. She works in pairs, left and right, and she does not break between them. If she stops, she said in a 2018 profile in Monocle, the tension changes and the boots will not match.
After stitching, the boots go to the lasting room, where they are pulled over wooden forms and left to dry for forty-eight hours. The forms are custom, made by a company in Vigevano that has been supplying Maison Margiela since 1989. The company is called Omniform. It is still family-run. The current owner, Luca Moretti, is the son of the man who made the first Tabi lasts.
The lasting is handled by two workers: Karim Bendali and Thérèse Fournier. Bendali has been with the house for twelve years, Fournier for nine. They work side by side at a long table, pulling leather tight over the forms and securing it with tacks that will be removed once the boot is dry. The tacks leave small holes in the insole. These holes are visible if you pull out the insole, which is why Maison Margiela's insoles are glued down. The house does not want you to see the process.
The signature
The Tabi is the only piece in Maison Margiela's archive that has been produced every season since the house was founded. It has appeared in calfskin, patent leather, suede, canvas, PVC, and — once, for Spring 2003 — in shearling with the wool left on. It has been made in flats, in heels, in knee-highs, in ankle boots, in mules. It has been shown on men and women. It has been copied by nearly every footwear brand with access to a split-toe mould.
But it is still cut by Dupont, stitched by Leroux, and lasted by Bendali and Fournier. The house has never moved production out of the Paris atelier. It has never licensed the design. It has never sold the pattern.
This is unusual. Most heritage pieces move to external factories once they reach a certain volume. The Tabi sells approximately eighteen thousand pairs per year, according to figures published in Business of Fashion in 2022. That is enough to justify a dedicated production line in Italy or Portugal, where labour costs are lower and output is faster. But Maison Margiela has kept the Tabi in-house, and the house has kept the same four artisans working on it, because the Tabi is not a product. It is a signature. And signatures, in this house, are not outsourced.
The next chapter
Dupont is sixty-one. She will retire in four years. Mercier is sixty-three. He will retire in two. Leroux is fifty-eight. She has not said when she will leave, but she has started training a replacement, a thirty-two-year-old stitcher named Anaïs Roche, who joined the atelier in 2021.
Roche trained at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the same school that produced Christian Dior's first head of atelier. She worked for Hermès for three years before joining Maison Margiela. She can stitch a Tabi toe in nine minutes, two minutes faster than Leroux, but Mercier has told her to slow down. Speed, he said in a 2023 interview with The Gentlewoman, is not the point.
The point is consistency. The point is that a Tabi made in 2024 should fit the same as a Tabi made in 1988. The point is that the house does not change the pattern, does not change the process, does not change the hands, because the hands are the signature.
Dupont will train Roche to cut before she retires. Leroux will train her to stitch. Bendali and Fournier will train her to last. And when Roche is ready, she will take over the Tabi, and the Tabi will continue, because that is how Maison Margiela works. The designer is anonymous. The design is not.
