Maison Margiela unwraps centuries of thread in Tokyo
For its first Japanese store's twentieth anniversary, Maison Margiela partners with Tokyo artist Mio Suzuki and Paris's legendary tapestry manufacturers to transform centuries old fabrics into new meaning through radical deconstruction.
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Threads unspooled and rewoven tell their own stories. Maison Margiela’s Line 2 installation now inhabits its Tokyo store, a meditation on the house’s persistent interrogation of time, decay and transformation. The collaboration brings together Tokyo based artist Mio Suzuki and Les Manufactures Nationales, Sèvres and Mobilier National, the revered French custodians of tapestry craft whose looms have animated palace walls and grand French rooms for centuries.
The proposition is characteristically Margiela: fifty nine tapestries, some discovered in Paris flea markets and reaching back four centuries, were despatched to Suzuki’s Tokyo studio. Over three months, she moved through them with meticulous patience, unravelling threads and rewording them into entirely new compositions. What emerges is both elegy and rebellion, fragments of accumulated beauty broken apart and reassembled, their original narratives ghosted by new forms. A seventeenth century pastoral scene bleeds into abstract geometry; darkened golds and deep indigos layer across cream and black grounds. The act of unmaking becomes an act of reverence.
To mark two decades since the house opened at 2-8-13, the installation remains at the Tokyo store through 15 November. The work embodies Line 2’s founding principle: creative dialogue that moves beyond commercial exchange. Suzuki and the French manufacturers have conversed across continents and centuries, their collaboration speaking to memory as something living, capable of transformation, never static or wholly lost.
Imagery courtesy of Maison Margiela (@maisonmargiela).