Byronesque, the contemporary vintage brand that focuses on selling collectors’ archives and reviving dormant brands, recently held a sale in Paris of one hundred and fifty pieces designed by Martin Margiela between 1989 and 2006. Actually, they were sold from a very Margiela-esque apartment in the Palais Royal, with an all white interior draped in cotton sheeting. Byronesque CEO and Editor in Chief Gill Linton couldn’t have found a more evocative setting if she’d tried—save for perhaps going to Martin Margiela’s old Parisian atelier/showroom, which was…all white with cotton sheeting draped over everything.
The sale, Martin Margiela: Not an Auction, For The People, was made up of a single woman’s collection: Christina Ahlers. Ahlers is a fashion executive who worked with Margiela for many years (and who, incidentally, is third left and second row from the top in Annie Leibovitz’s iconic image of the Margiela team from Vogue September 2008). It was time, Ahlers felt it was time let it all go—or at least, let most of it go. Some pieces she held back because, well, because; the clothing we wore yesterday can still have an inexorable hold today. This set us thinking: What stories are you telling when you let your past go, when you’re selling someone’s past, both that of a designer and the person who owned the clothes, and when you buy that past to make it your own?
Well, we’re about to find out. Over the course of that sale, I visited Ahlers, Linton, and Aurora Lopez Mejia, an artist and jeweler who is a longtime Margiela devotee, to chat with each of them about how they saw Martin Margiela and what vintage means to them. Here’s what they had to say, and all of it, I might say, is a tribute to a designer who was as creatively monumental as he was intensely private, always shying away from being in the public eye.
The Collector: Christina Ahlers
I was studying to be a criminal lawyer in Germany, but I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted to be doing. I needed a Plan B. I did an internship at a commercial fashion showroom that had worked with Martin [Margiela] since the early days of his label, and the woman running it offered me a job. I knew it wouldn’t be with Martin, but with the other brands she had, and I was like, “It’s really Martin I want to work for.” His work had caught my attention really early on—my mother introduced me to it, as she was in fashion. The first piece I saw was a little felted wool vest.
Then, when I was a student living in Hamburg, I would go to Munich every few months, and a store there had one of Martin’s cabans [peacoat jacket]—the iconic caban with the leather buttons. Over the next year and a half, I’d go look at what the store had, and one day, when the owner told me that he’d noticed me coming in for so many months, I explained that I was studying and couldn’t really afford anything. He said to me, “So how much could you spend?” I told him, and he said, “You know what? I will give you a discount—I am sure you will be a great Margiela customer in the future.” I still have that caban jacket.
