Maison Martin Margiela at Somerset House

Entry: £6 adults / £5 concessions / under 12s free

When I post an exhibition entry I give it the date that I visited the exhibition, even if I wrote the entry a few days after the visit, (which is usually the case). This time it took me an entire week to sit down and write something about the Maison Martin Margiela exhibition because I just didn't know what to say about it.

I suspected I'd have this problem. Fashion has never interested me and high fashion is downright alien to me. I think my main difficulty is with accepting that a fashion designer can be an artist and can create clothes that are purely aesthetic and utterly impractical for day-to-day wear. In the same way that architects should make houses that can be lived in and chefs should make food that is edible, so clothing designers should make clothes that are actually wearable. However, I am quite happy to accept that this is entirely my own prejudice and that plenty of people admire what Maison Martin Margiela do, but it will also be impossible for me to put this bias aside while writing this review.

Maison Martin Margiela was established in 1988 by Martin Margiela. This exhibition celebrates the house's 20^th anniversary, which actually took place in October 2008. It's a substantial exhibition with 30 exhibits of varying size, (most of the exhibits collect several items of clothing from particularly notable collection or line). There are certain themes that recur in MMM's work, most notably the deconstruction and recycling of existing garments, as exemplified by fake fur coats constructed from wigs and well-tailored jackets with the seams on the outside. In keeping with this interest in transformation is an entire collection based on visual trickery:

The 1996 Spring-Summer collection was made up of printed articles of clothing with a very simple cut and produced in fine flowing fabric. […] Each piece is printed with a photograph of another garment, of which both the cut and the material differ strongly from the skirt, jacket or dress on which the photograph is printed.*

These are really well-done. While they don't quite trick the eye, they do demand a second, closer look. MMM have continued playing with such effects, (with mixed results), and the 1996 garments are accompanied by a selection of accessories and clothes from throughout the company's history.

Of course, this unexpected high point was accompanied by plenty that didn't work for me. Further on in the exhibition are two sections (29. 'A Doll's Wardrobe' and 30. XXXL) that downright annoyed me. 'A Doll's Wardrobe' is a collection of “clothing inspired by dolls' wardrobes, such as those of Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe”. It's not entirely clear if these clothes are simply inspired by dolls' wardrobes or if they are exact, albeit enlarged, replicas of specific doll clothes, (the exhibition guide is a bit vague on this point), but apparently “the theme is the standard, idealised body”. Which would be fine except for the fact that these clothes don't look any weirder than anything else in the exhibition.

Yes, there are some details that are a bit off – uncut threads suggesting hasty, unskilled construction, oversized buttons and zips – but these don't look very outlandish in terms of shape. If the intent was to show the distorted physiques of the dolls it completely fails, though it might have had more of an impact if the clothes had been displayed on mannequins rather than spread flat against a wall.

The XXXL exhibit has a slightly different problem. To quote the exhibition guide again:

In several of their collections, Maison Martin Margiela has deviated significantly from the standardised body as presented by fashion. Various collections explored the idea of oversized clothing by wrapping the body like a gigantic artificial cocoon.

I don't have a problem with either of these sentences on their own, but together they don't seem to make sense. How exactly is swaddling your usual rail-thin models in acres of excess cloth and shoes that are clownishly too big for them transgressive?

In the end I left feeling cross that anybody would think that any of this was remotely daring and provocative, and even less convinced than ever of the point of high fashion.

*All quotes taken from the free guide to the exhibition.