Martin Margiela's First Solo Art Exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations Explores Hair, Mortality, and Belgian Surrealism

Martin Margiela's inaugural solo exhibition as a visual artist ran at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris from 20 October 2021 to 2 January 2022. The Belgian fashion designer, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, transitioned from couture to art in 2008. His show features works like Film Dust (2017–21), three large canvases memorializing hair and dust on celluloid with diluted oil paint on glass-beaded fabric, echoing Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's Dust Breeding (1920). A Duchampian soft sculpture, Dust Cover (2021), appears alongside 'ghosts'—blank placeholders with titles of absent works, referencing Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings (1951) and Margiela's own reclusive persona. Hair is a central theme, with pieces like Cartography (2019), a print diagramming hair growth on PVC, wood, and foam, alluding to theories linking hair patterns to homosexuality, and Vanitas (2019), five silicon heads with implanted hair from his brother's salon, exploring vanity and mortality. Other works include a fake-fur bus shelter behind glass, a fluorescent billboard with pastel crotch or armpit images, and marble or silicone sculptures resembling meat cuts. The exhibition concludes with oversized red porcelain fingernails, highlighting fashion's futile attempts to conceal decay. Influences from Belgian surrealism, René Magritte, and Marcel Broodthaers permeate the show, which questions human identity through dust, hair, and bodily fragments.