The fitting room at Maison Margiela is white

The fitting room at Maison Margiela is white. The walls, the floor, the chairs — white. The only colour comes from the garments themselves, and even those, more often than not, arrive in shades of cream, grey, and bone. It is here, in this blank space on the Rue Saint-Maur, that three women have stood over the years, each in turn shaping what the house means when it drapes a shoulder or splits a seam.

They did not work together. They did not share a studio. But Jenny Meirens, Cathy Horyn, and Michèle Lamy form a kind of trinity around Margiela — the gallerist who framed the work, the critic who named what it was doing, and the collaborator who carried its spirit forward when the founder himself had long since left.

The gallerist who made it visible

Jenny Meirens did not set out to work in fashion. She ran a gallery in Antwerp in the early Eighties, showing conceptual art and installation work. Martin Margiela, then a recent graduate of the Royal Academy, was designing freelance and looking for a way to show his first collection. Meirens offered her space.

The Spring/Summer 1989 presentation took place in a children's playground in the 20th arrondissement. Models walked on gravel. The clothes — deconstructed blazers, inside-out seams, tabi boots — looked like they had been assembled in a squat. Meirens was there, not as a stylist or producer, but as the person who understood that the work needed context, not just a catwalk.

She became Margiela's business partner. For the next fifteen years, she handled everything that was not design: production, distribution, the decision to show in Paris rather than Milan, the choice to never give interviews under Margiela's own name. The house operated as a collective. Press releases were unsigned. The designer never took a bow.

This was Meirens' doing as much as Margiela's. She had seen how galleries functioned — the work spoke, the artist receded. She applied that logic to a fashion house at a time when designers were becoming celebrities. It worked because she made it work. She found the factories willing to produce deconstructed tailoring. She negotiated with department stores that did not yet understand why a customer would pay for a garment with exposed seams.

When Margiela left the house in 2009, Meirens stayed on briefly, then stepped back. She has given few interviews since. The gallery closed years ago. But the structure she built — the refusal of personality, the insistence on the garment as object — remains.

The critic who gave it language

Cathy Horyn did not write about Maison Margiela because she loved it. She wrote about it because she could not ignore it. Her reviews in The New York Times and, later, The Cut, treated the house as a problem to be solved. What was it doing? Why did it matter? And why, in a decade of logo-heavy maximalism, did a white cotton shirt with the label on the outside feel more radical than anything coming out of Milan?

Horyn's Spring/Summer 2000 review is often cited. She described a collection built around oversized tailoring and flat-front trousers, shown on a runway covered in moss. The models wore wigs made of synthetic hair. The clothes looked like they had been stolen from a much larger person. Horyn called it "a meditation on scale and the body." She did not call it beautiful. She called it rigorous.

This mattered because Margiela's work resisted easy description. It was not avant-garde in the way Rei Kawakubo was avant-garde. It was not minimal in the way Jil Sander was minimal. It was something else — a kind of forensic fashion, interested in how garments were made and what happened when you undid the making.

Horyn gave it a vocabulary. She wrote about the house's use of found objects, its habit of turning linings into exteriors, its obsession with the archive. She noted that Margiela's collections often felt like essays on other collections — not copies, but examinations. A trench coat was not just a trench coat. It was a study of what a trench coat could be if you removed the buttons, flattened the lapels, and cut it from parachute silk.

Her writing did not make the house popular. It made it legible. Designers could reference Margiela in their own work because Horyn had established a critical framework. A deconstructed blazer was no longer just a blazer with the seams showing. It was a statement about construction, about the relationship between interior and exterior, about what fashion hides and what it should reveal.

The collaborator who carried it forward

Michèle Lamy met Rick Owens in Los Angeles in the early Nineties. By then, she had already run nightclubs, designed furniture, and spent time in Paris absorbing the work coming out of the Rue Saint-Maur. When Owens began designing his own collections, Lamy became his collaborator — not his muse, a word she has always rejected, but his sounding board.

What she brought from Margiela was not a look. It was a method. Owens' early collections — draped jerseys, elongated proportions, a palette of black and grey — were often compared to Margiela's work, but the connection was deeper than aesthetic. Both houses treated fashion as a form of making, not styling. Both were interested in the body as architecture. Both refused the idea that a garment should flatter.

Lamy's role was to hold that line. Owens has said in interviews that she is the one who tells him when something is too pretty, too easy, too much like what people expect. She is also the one who insists on the rituals — the all-black shows, the refusal to advertise, the decision to cast friends and collaborators rather than professional models.

She has worked directly with Maison Margiela as well. In 2018, she collaborated with John Galliano, who had taken over as creative director nearly a decade earlier, on a series of furniture pieces shown during Paris Fashion Week. The pieces — chairs made from found wood, tables wrapped in leather — felt like extensions of the house's early work. They were functional objects treated as sculpture.

Lamy does not speak about Margiela in reverent terms. She speaks about it as a set of principles. Do not explain. Do not apologise. Do not make it easy. These are the same principles she applies to her own work, and the same ones she has brought to Owens' house.

What remains

Maison Margiela is no longer run by any of these women. Galliano has been creative director since 2014, and his collections — theatrical, referential, often built around couture techniques — are not what Margiela himself would have made. But the structure is still there. The white label. The numbered lines. The refusal to treat fashion as entertainment.

Meirens built the frame. Horyn gave it language. Lamy carried the method forward. None of them were muses. They were collaborators, critics, architects. The house would not exist without them.