Maison Margiela opens a new store located in Reel Department Store, Shanghai. The store concept is designed by Dutch architect Studio Anne Holtrop and reflects the evolved visual language established at the house by creative director John Galliano. Holtrop’s design wasfirst introduced in the gypsum-cast set at the Artisanal Autumn/ Winter 2018 show, and it interprets the Maison’s iconoclast codes in façade and interiors. 

The store is an abstracted and inviting environment rooted in the notion of appropriating the inappropriate. The 160-square meter boutique displays the complete range of Maison Margiela’s Co-Ed collections, men’s and women’s ready to wear, accessories, shoes, small leather goods, as well as jewelry, eyewear and fragrances.

At the Reel store, the defining structures of architecture – walls and columns – appear as detached objects. Artisanal furnishings reflect and alter ideas of familiarity. Familiar shapes skew in form, as they lean and fold around the demarcation of the space, drawing on ideas of dressing in haste native to Maison Margiela’s vocabulary. Hand-cast individually in textile molds, the surfaces of the plaster walls and columns retain the memory of fabric texture, sculpting dents, and evoke the notion of an irreproducible hand-spun tactility.

Retained in their natural shade of plaster – the humble inside of a wall – the structures reflect the practice of anonymity of the lining, the house term for revealing the inside of a garment traditionally concealed and revealing the inner workings. The plaster’s natural tonality further echoes the signature white of Maison Margiela.