Maison Margiela Opens the Folders — and It Changes How We Look at Fashion

Maison Margiela isn’t launching a collection. It’s opening a process.

With MaisonMargiela/folders, the house introduces a new way of encountering its work — not as a finished object, but as something unfolding in real time. Less spectacle, more structure. Less reveal, more excavation. At its core, the project asks a quiet but radical question: what happens when a fashion house lets us see how meaning is made?

Rooted in the Maison’s founding ideas, codes, and values, folders turn the archive into an active space rather than a sealed one. Through a mix of physical exhibitions and digital access, Margiela brings four of its most foundational codes into focus: Artisanal, Anonymity, Tabi, and Bianchetto. Not as branding exercises, but as living principles — still shaping how the house thinks, works, and resists.

The project begins with the Fall–Winter 2026 show, presented live in Shanghai on April 1, 2026, as a special guest of Fashion Week. From there, it expands outward — across cities, formats, and audiences — into a series of exhibitions and immersive experiences taking place throughout China this April.

Each city holds one code.

In Shanghai, Artisanal is explored as a creative laboratory — a space where making is visible, imperfect, and experimental. In Beijing, Anonymity traces the Maison’s long relationship with masks, absence, and refusal — a history of stepping back so the work can speak. Chengdu hosts Tabi, not just as a shoe, but as a cultural object that carries memory, rupture, and repetition. And in Shenzhen, Bianchetto becomes an atelier experience — white paint not as purity, but as protection, transformation, and time made visible.

What’s striking is the openness. These exhibitions are free. Public. Unlocked. Registration opens March 17. This isn’t fashion performing exclusivity — it’s fashion choosing access.

That gesture extends into the digital realm. From February 10, Maison Margiela made its internal Dropbox folders public for the first time. The same folders used by the team to store images, timelines, press releases, working documents — now available to anyone, anywhere. As the project evolves, new files will be added, documenting the journey from concept to exhibition in real time.

Fashion rarely shows its drafts. Margiela is showing the footnotes.

There’s something deeply Margiela about this move. A house long obsessed with absence, authorship, and the politics of visibility now turns transparency into a medium. Not transparency as marketing — but transparency as method. As refusal of the polished lie.

MaisonMargiela/folders doesn’t ask us to consume. It asks us to look closer. To read. To trace how ideas travel across time, bodies, and geographies. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s continuity.

Not a museum. Not a campaign.

An archive that breathes.