For the Spring Summer 2010 the Maison Martin Margiela design team continued to work on the Artisanal collection of re-purposed object’s come Haute Couture. However, in October of 2009, Margiela stakeholder Renzo Rosso finally came clean on Margiela’s whereabouts. “Martin has not been there for a long time. He is here, but not here. We have a new, fresh design team on board. We are focusing on young, realistic energy for the future; this is really Margiela for the year 2015.”

Unfortunately, it was not 2015. Re-purposed vintage evening wear was meek, at best an attempt to breathe life into a house that has quite frankly lost their “raison d’etre”. The design team totally missed it; instead trying to resurrect what once was. They should have simply scraped Artisanal and moved onwards to something new and innovative, trying harder to create the out-of-this world couture Maison is known for. Instead it was lifeless, trashy, and dull.

-George Fracasse