Maison Margiela Brand
Maison Margiela X Gentle Monster 2024 Collection
Luxferity, 07.03.2024
Maison Margiela and Gentle Monster announced the newest chapter in their comprehensive eyewear collaboration. Launching on 7 March 2024, the second instalment of the genderless line was partly unveiled on the occasion of the Co-Ed Spring-Summer 2024 Show in October 2023.
Conceived by Creative Director John Galliano, the sunglasses and spectacles are informed by the collection’s themes of time and inheritance, and the steely, industrial environment that embodies it. The line – comprised of 17 designs – conjures the grammar of retro-futurism and heroism through animated silhouettes evocative of imagery familiar to our mutual recollection. The proposal is reflected in a creative dialogue fuelled by the experimental artisanal values shared by Gentle Monster and Maison Margiela. Photographed by Jordan Hemingway, a campaign contextualises the eyewear within a hyper-realistic, dream-like setting founded in the time-transcendent transatlantic voyage that inspired the narrative of the Co-Ed Spring-Summer 2024 Collection.
Through a chemical reaction between eras and attitudes, a futuristic yet organic form language takes shape in the voluminous, metallic, mask-like MM101 and MM102 moulded to wrap around the contours of the eyes and nose. With their robotic engineering, the designs – proposed with rubber-wrapped or rimless frames in silver, black, red, white and blue nuances – feature bolted temples adorned with the four white stitches of Maison Margiela. The silhouettes nod at the house’s heroic cutting, a practice through which chivalrous or armour-like silhouettes are conjured within garments or accessories. The MM101 and MM102 are presented in silver capitonnage eyewear cases adapted from Maison Margiela’s signature cloud-like Glam Slam bag and come with additional nose pads.
The design filters into the MM103 in which the rimless metallic form is sculpted into a futuristic take on the classic cat-eye with narrow bolted temples, rendered in silver, blue or black. It activates the Maison Margiela notion of unconscious glamour – imagery and gestures that instinctively resonate as glamorous in our collective historical awareness – likewise reflected in seven designs founded in the memory of iconographic sunglasses: the oval MM104 and MM105; the rectangular MM106; the elliptical MM107; the cat-eye MM108; and the trapezoid MM109 and MM110. The silhouettes are proposed in black, white or silver acetate as well as in leather-framed editions across black, ivory, khaki and blue nuances. The MM103-110s are presented in white Glam Slam eyewear cases.
The collection features seven spectacle designs adapted from the shapes of sunglasses and subverted through the grammar of Maison Margiela, a transition first observed in the initial collaboration between the Maison and Gentle Monster. They include the ovoid MM111 and MM112; the sculpted rectangular MM113 and MM114; the futuristic brow-line MM115; and the skewed trapezoid MM116 and MM117. The silhouettes are proposed in black, tortoiseshell or clear manifestations while the MM115 materialises with leather-wrapped frames in black or ivory. The spectacles are presented are presented in white Glam Slam eyewear cases.
In its creative approach, Gentle Monster explores dualities inherent to individual expression: playfulness vs. elegance, delicacy vs. destruction, past vs. future. The juxtapositions reflect the illustrative and figurative themes intrinsic to the methodology of Maison Margiela, which continuously considers notions of how we dress and why: the memories, familiarities and instinctive choices and gestures that inform the way we present ourselves. An infinite tool for self-expression, the evocative designs of eyewear – and the body languages they enable – are steeped in societal, cultural and pop cultural associations that connect us all.
