Maison Margiela Opens Its Folders, and Invites Us In

With the launch of MaisonMargiela/folders, Maison Margiela does what it has always done best: it pulls back the curtain quietly.

Rather than unveiling another glossy campaign, the Maison is opening up its creative process in a way that feels deeply aligned with its DNA. The project begins with the Fall Winter 2026 show in Shanghai this April, presented as a special guest of Shanghai Fashion Week, before unfolding across a series of exhibitions and experiences in four Chinese cities.

Each stop explores one of Margiela’s foundational codes: Artisanal, Anonymity, Tabi, and Bianchetto. These aren’t presented as museum-like heritage moments, but as living ideas. Shanghai becomes a creative laboratory for Artisanal. Beijing reflects on masks and identity through Anonymity. Chengdu celebrates the cult of Tabi. Shenzhen opens the doors to Bianchetto through an atelier experience. All four exhibitions are free and open to the public.

But the most Margiela gesture comes online.

For the first time, the Maison has made its internal working folders public — the same digital spaces used by its teams to store images, timelines, press material, and evolving ideas. As the project progresses, new files will be added, allowing anyone to follow along, piece by piece.

It’s not about oversharing. It’s about transparency as philosophy.

In a fashion landscape driven by instant visuals and fast consumption, MaisonMargiela/folders feels deliberately slower. It invites you to browse, to read, to sit with fragments. To understand fashion not just as finished product, but as process. As accumulation. As thought.

There’s something refreshing about that.

Margiela has never been interested in shouting. Instead, it offers clues. Layers. Gaps. And now, folders. It’s an invitation to engage with the Maison on its own terms, to trace ideas back to their origins, and to witness creativity while it’s still forming.

MaisonMargiela/folders is a great reminder that fashion can still be intellectual, intimate, and deeply human. Sometimes, opening the archive says more than launching a campaign ever could.

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