Jacket

Martin Margiela questioned many of the established rules of high fashion, mainly by using techniques of deconstruction, recycling, Surrealist montage and the notion of replicas of standardized garments. The use of found objects, vintage fabrics and repurposed materials questioned notions of consumerism and preciosity.
This wool jacket with contrasting satin lapel mimics a tuxedo jacket, a formal men’s dinner’ jacket. Its padded, shrunken shoulder line was introduced in Margiela’s first collection for spring/summer 1989. The narrow silhouette with an outline of a nineteenth century jacket was a huge shift from the typical broad-shouldered silhouette of the 1980s and prefigured the new slim and deconstructed silhouette for the final decade of the twentieth century. It also referenced the fin de siècle silhouette of a century earlier, thus connecting different fashionable eras through construction and pattern. Margiela kept on redesigning shoulders over the course of his career, ending with wide and conical shapes. The shoulder was an important structural element for his designs, rather than the waist or bust.