Maison Margiela Enters Fashion’s Arts and Culture Race with Line of ‘Intangible Products’

What does Margiela sell, really — the Tabi boot or the tale behind it?

Surely the clubby feeling the brand provides to fashion fans who are versed in the lore surrounding its logo-free, conceptual designs or numerical-coded tags is as much a draw as the items themselves.

Now Margiela is leaning into that notion with a line of “intangible products”— as the brand is referring to its new programme of collaborations with figures from art and culture.

Line 2, as the initiative will be called, is the latest addition to the 37 year-old brand’s numerical classification system, which denotes the category an item belongs to (shoes, perfume, runway womenswear) with a circled number on its tag ranging from 0 to 23.

“Intangible products, for me, means something that goes above and beyond purchasing. It’s about connection, it’s part of a community,” chief executive Gaetano Sciuto said. “We decided to call it Line 2 because we want to make it as important, if not more important, than a single product.”

In recent years, luxury brands have multiplied and foregrounded their ties to art and culture, adding painters, dancers and poets to their roster of front-row stars; commissioning installations and activations for stores; and sponsoring exhibitions and concerts. Some of the biggest players have even opened art museums to bolster their reputations for tastemaking and civic engagement (Fondazione Prada and Fondation Louis Vuitton, most notably).

In June, Dior brought in works by Chardin from the Louvre and the National Galleries of Scotland as part of the set for its debut menswear show by Jonathan Anderson. Celine bankrolled monthly free-entry days to the Centre Pompidou’s Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition this summer.

Margiela’s initiative is starting comparatively small: The brand will stage an installation by visual artist Heemin Chung and sound designer Joyul in its Seoul flagship from September 3 — at the same time as the Frieze contemporary art fair in the city.

Designating the installation as the first in a new line of “intangible products” may seem like a clever bit of PR. Still, the move marks a clear evolution for Margiela, which has kept a tight focus on fashion and design even as many brands in the luxury space rebalanced their activities toward cultural curation, spectacle and buzz in recent years.

The brand has long held onto its identity as a mysterious house, championing the conceptual, collective vision of its largely anonymous founder. Deconstructed and reconstructed garments, replicas of curated design artifacts and vintage pieces recycled into demi-couture gowns have done most of the talking for the brand.

At the same time, the historically niche brand is now more talked-about than ever, emerging as a bright spot for its owner, Renzo Rosso’s fashion group OTB. Even as the broader luxury market contracted last year, the brand grew 4.6 percent, with strength in shoes — its fastest-growing category — and ready-to-wear helping to balance challenges in leather goods. An internet-breaking couture show last year by former creative director John Galliano pushed its visibility to new heights — awareness the brand would be loath to let wither.

Cross-pollinations with art and culture can create opportunities for the brand to speak more often and more loudly to its audience, without diluting its intellectual edge.

“Storytelling, to me, is essential, and Margiela in the past hasn’t always told its full story commercially,” Sciuto said.

While the initiative was already underway when current creative director Glenn Martens joined the brand early this year, the designer has embraced it as a tool to expand the brand’s impact and message beyond the runway. “Glenn will be 100 percent involved now. He was in love with the idea: it gives him another playground to bring his talent to Margiela and to our clients,” Sciuto said.

Going forward, the brand plans to keep building momentum around Marten’s vision with updated communications and merchandising to “show people that we’re unconventional, yes, but also inclusive — not just a brand for the few,” Sciuto said. “There’s a lot going on at the brand, and supporting that is the fact that Glenn’s vision is 100 percent aligned to the brand’s vision.”

Martens staged a well-received couture debut in July, threading the needle between the house’s anonymous ethos and the more attention-grabbing imagery of its recent past with a buzzy runway show featuring models in crumpled gold and silver masks.

Martens’ first ready-to-wear show for Margiela will take place at Paris Fashion Week in early October.