Sixty-eight deconstructed frames, a short film by Alex Prager and pop-ups from Seoul to Melbourne: the Paris house and the Korean eyewear brand are four collections in.
A fourth collaboration means it’s no longer a fling. Maison Margiela and Gentle Monster release their fourth joint eyewear collection on October 29, and the Paris house and the South Korean brand have picked a theme that suits a pair of sunglasses better than you’d expect: deconstruction.
The line runs to 68 SKUs, split between 43 sunglasses and 25 optical frames. The starting point is the familiar eyewear shape, which the designers then push in different directions. Some get lifted, others get distorted. Several look crushed or knocked out of true, as if they spent a night at the bottom of a bag. That damaged-on-purpose look, according to the brands, defines the visual language of the partnership.
Big frames, tight wraps
The two ends of the range pull in opposite directions. At one end are oversized frames with exaggerated volume. They’re designed to hide the wearer’s face from other people while widening their own field of vision. You get to see more of the street, and the street gets to see less of you.
At the other end are narrow, upswept models wrapped tightly in leather. That’s a nod to Maison Margiela’s “Second Skin,” the idea of a material that clings to its object like a layer of its own.
Then there are the stitches. Margiela’s four white stitches show up on the temples throughout the collection, as they do on so much of the house’s work. On the slimmer styles, though, there’s a new branding detail: the stitches are woven so they seem to float over the edges of the frame. The label is still there. It just looks like it’s hovering.
A woman, ten minutes, one shifting city
The campaign comes as a short film directed by Alex Prager, who is drawn to uncanny moments in everyday life. The plot is simple and a little stressful. A woman has ten minutes to meet someone, and she rushes through a city that keeps rearranging itself around her. The eyewear turns up on the various characters she passes, so the glasses become a thread running through a place that won’t hold still.
It’s a sensible visual match for a collection built on things that look slightly off. Crushed frames feel at home in a city that shifts mid-sprint.
Eight cities, mostly in Asia
Pop-up spaces open on launch day in eight cities: Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne and Paris. Six of the eight are in Asia, which says something about where this partnership expects its audience to be. Several of the pop-ups sit inside Gentle Monster’s own stores, including its Haus Nowhere locations in Seoul, Shanghai and Bangkok.
Each space translates the collection’s idea into what the brands call an unfinished aesthetic, built from unstable, irregular forms. Expect shop interiors that look mid-demolition, or mid-construction, depending on your mood.
Seoul gets something extra. To mark the launch, choreographer and creative director Damien Jalet and artist Ian McMahon present a performance that reads deconstruction through movement. Body, space, objects and light collide in it, taking existing structures apart and rebuilding them in new forms. In other words, the sunglasses concept gets a live-action version, with people in place of frames.
Why this pairing keeps working
Margiela has long been the house that shows its seams, and a collection that crushes and stretches ordinary frames fits that habit naturally. Gentle Monster, for its part, builds its stores as spaces that are part retail, part installation, and the Haus Nowhere locations in this rollout show how comfortably it takes on a concept like “unfinished.” Four collections in, the two brands appear to have found a shared language: Margiela supplies the stitches and the attitude toward construction, Gentle Monster supplies the frames and the rooms to show them in.
For anyone who wears glasses all day, the optical frames are the quiet detail here. Twenty-five of the 68 styles are made for prescriptions, so the deconstructed look isn’t limited to sunglasses season. The oversized pairs may be the headline, but the slim, leather-wrapped, floating-stitch frames are the ones you could imagine wearing to a meeting.
The collection lands October 29 across all eight pop-up cities.
Via FashionUnited
