Shoes

Martin Margiela repeated the motif of the tabi boots during his twenty years at the helm of the Maison Martin Margiela (1989–2009), every season in a different iteration. Inspired by the Japanese sock with split-toe, the tabi, the concept of the tabi boots involved a leather "sock" attached to a wooden, circular block heel based on 1970s wedge styles. For fall/winter 1991–92, Margiela applied his signature white paint to different garments and the tabi boots, a gesture which can be interpreted as both modern as well as post-modern. The white paint echoes the erasure of referential meaning through the use of white paint as instigated by Russian Suprematism in the arts, but the application of it on clothing and shoes, and its subsequent peeling, is a postmodern marker of time, ephemerality and imperfection, imbuing the object with a patina of anthropomorphic qualities.