## The Women Who Made Margiela

The Women Who Made Margiela

The first time Carine Roitfeld wore a white Tabi boot to a fashion week, she paired it with a men's blazer and bare legs. This was 1991. The boot was split at the toe, modelled on a fifteenth-century Japanese sock, and it looked like nothing else coming out of Paris. Roitfeld wasn't trying to make a statement. She was simply wearing what Martin Margiela had sent her, and what Margiela had sent her was, by most standards, unwearable.

She wore it anyway.

Maison Margiela built its reputation on refusal. Refusal to show the designer's face. Refusal to give interviews. Refusal to acknowledge the fashion system as anything other than a set of conventions waiting to be dismantled. But the house never refused its muses. Three women, in particular, defined what Margiela meant when it claimed to dress the modern woman. Not the aspirational one. Not the one in the ads. The one walking past the atelier on Rue Saint-Maur at nine in the morning, coat half-buttoned, thinking about something else entirely.

Carine Roitfeld: The Stylist as Collaborator

Roitfeld came to Margiela through necessity. She was styling for French Marie Claire in the late Eighties, and everything looked the same. Shoulder pads, gold buttons, the tyranny of good taste. Margiela's first collection arrived in 1989 with garments that had been dyed with mould and coats made from military surplus. Roitfeld saw it and called the showroom.

What she understood, and what the house understood about her, was that Margiela's clothes required a certain complicity. You couldn't just put them on. You had to know what you were doing. Roitfeld knew. She styled the Tabi boots with vintage Levi's. She wore the deconstructed blazers open over ribbed vests. She took the house's refusal to finish a hem and made it look like confidence.

The collaboration was never formalised. Margiela didn't do brand ambassadors. But Roitfeld appeared in editorials wearing the house's pieces throughout the Nineties, often styled by her own hand, and the message was clear: this is what intelligence looks like when it gets dressed.

She later told System magazine that Margiela taught her to see clothes as ideas first, garments second. The Tabi boot wasn't a boot. It was a question. Why do we assume the human foot should be packaged as a single unit? Why do we accept the shape of things simply because we've seen it before?

Roitfeld's influence on Margiela is often reduced to visibility. She wore the clothes, so other people wore the clothes. But the deeper contribution was conceptual. She demonstrated that Margiela's intellectual rigour didn't preclude desire. You could want the coat and understand the coat at the same time.

Jenny Meirens: The Woman Who Saw It First

Before Roitfeld, before the Tabi boot became a cult object, there was Jenny Meirens. She ran a boutique in Antwerp called Cocodrillo, and in 1988 she took a chance on a designer no one had heard of. Margiela's graduate collection from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts had been shown once, to a small audience, and then disappeared. Meirens tracked him down.

The boutique was small, and Antwerp was not Paris. But Meirens had a reputation for knowing what mattered before it mattered. She had stocked Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester when they were still working out of shared studios. She looked at Margiela's early pieces—garments with exposed seams, linings turned outward, sleeves that didn't quite match—and placed an order.

Meirens never styled Margiela for editorial. She didn't need to. Her clients were architects, artists, women who read Artforum and wore black in summer. They understood what Margiela was doing because Meirens had already taught them to see fashion as a form of critical practice. The boutique became a testing ground. If something sold at Cocodrillo, it had a future.

What Meirens gave Margiela was permission. Not financial backing—she couldn't afford that—but intellectual permission. The sense that there was an audience for clothes that refused to seduce in the traditional sense. Margiela's early collections were shown in abandoned playgrounds and derelict metro stations. Models walked through puddles. Hems dragged in the dirt. Meirens bought it all.

She closed Cocodrillo in 1993, long before Margiela became commercially viable. But her influence persisted. The house's entire retail strategy—small boutiques, no department stores, no compromises—came directly from the Antwerp model. You didn't sell Margiela next to Chanel. You sold it to people who already knew why it mattered.

Pat Cleveland: The Muse Who Walked

Pat Cleveland walked for Margiela twice. Once in 1997, at forty-six, when most houses had decided she was too old for the runway. And again in 2018, at sixty-seven, when John Galliano brought her back for his couture show. Both times, she wore the house's signature white Tabi boots.

Cleveland's history with Margiela is shorter than Roitfeld's, less foundational than Meirens'. But it matters because of what it says about the house's definition of beauty. Cleveland had been the face of Halston, the muse of Stephen Burrows, the first Black model to sign a major cosmetics contract. By the mid-Nineties, the industry had moved on. Margiela hadn't.

The 1997 show was held in a parking garage. Cleveland walked in an oversized trench, bare-legged, hair pulled back. No makeup. No styling. Just the coat and the boots and the fact of her presence. She moved differently than the younger models. Less angular. More grounded. The coat moved with her.

Galliano, when he took over the house in 2014, kept Cleveland in mind. His 2018 couture collection referenced Margiela's archival pieces, and Cleveland walked in a reconstructed version of the trench she'd worn two decades earlier. Same boots. Same confidence. The fashion press called it a moment. Cleveland called it work.

What Cleveland represented for Margiela—both under the original designer and under Galliano—was continuity. The house's aesthetic changed. The business model changed. Ownership changed hands. But the commitment to a certain kind of woman, one who had lived enough to know what clothes could and couldn't do, remained.

What Remains

Maison Margiela is now owned by OTB Group. Galliano has been at the helm for a decade. The original designer left in 2009 and hasn't been seen since. The house still doesn't put names on labels, still numbers its collections by archival line, still insists on a certain inscrutability.

But the muses remain. Roitfeld still wears the Tabi boots. Meirens' model of careful curation has become the blueprint for every boutique that wants to sell difficult clothes. Cleveland still walks, when the house asks, and the house still asks.

The lesson, if there is one, is that a house is only as good as the women who understand it. Not the ones who wear it for the cameras. The ones who see it first, style it honestly, and keep wearing it when everyone else has moved on.