In the heart of Schuttershofstraat, one of Antwerp’s most prestigious shopping streets, shines Blinds, Martin Margiela’s first outdoor workformer stylist and founder of the fashion house of the same name.
Integral part of the project Art in the City conceived by the Middelheim Museum, the silver monument is not only as a physical presence in the heart of the Dutch city, but is presented as a threshold between the visible and the invisible, designed to instill curiosity and provoke reflections in passers-by without the need for words. The artist himself, notoriously reluctant to public presence and elusive in the media, has always preferred the silent language of his creations to rhetoric: a mix of rare discretion and infinite inventiveness that has characterized his figure and his creative approach, from the legendary fashion collections up to his official debut in the art world in 2021.
The sculpture immediately captures attention, acting as a mysterious point of refraction between reality and imagination. Blinds in fact, it is inspired by the curtains that typically veil the view, offering an often fundamental layer of privacy. However, Martin Margiela overturns this function, bringing it into a public context where it becomes an invitation to open dialogue. The love for subversion of the elements and their unusual recomposition, after all, has always been part of his vision, from flip-flop sandals transformed into closed shoes, the legendary – and still in vogue – Tabi, to wigs used not to change hairstyle, but as material for very original jackets .
Blinds it has no back, it offers no hidden side, raising questions about what it may actually hide. Walking around the sculpture always takes you back to the same point, in a continuous game of “unveilings” that never happen. Shining with a silvery hue, the work also recalls the windows of the surrounding shops, and the passer-by is also captured by the changing reflection of his own image in the city context: a dreamy perspective, which in the urban scene becomes a reference to Belgian surrealismwhich has always been a source of inspiration for the designer, echoing the words of René Magritte: «Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what is visible». In this way Martin Margiela plays with the dynamics of vision, of visual seduction and of his own unpredictabilitywhich is so needed today – and for which its contribution is so lacking – even in the fashion industry.
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Source: Vanity Fair
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