Enfnts Terribles

Supreme x MM6 Maison Margiela Snatched the Wig

The hardcore fashion archivists will know (and love) the original Maison Margiela ‘wig coat’ showcased as part of the Spring/Summer 2009 collection, the last designed by Martin Margiela before leaving his eponymous brand. This wasn’t the first time the designer toyed with wigs, a concept first brought to life for his Fall/Winter 1997 collection in collaboration with the design studio BLESS, where models bore Ziggy Stardust-inspired wigs. This idea was reworked for the Maison’s Fall/Winter 2005 Artisanal line, where costume wigs were repurposed to create jackets and accessories. Just as in his Spring/Summer 2009 collection, Martin Margiela once again disrupted the Parisian fashion scene by employing transgressive methods of production in the world of luxury through upcycling and reusing old fabrics. While this may be a norm today, it was an act of subversion back then.

As seen in the original ‘wig coat’ and Supreme’s recent MM6 Maison Margiela collaboration, the wig used has dyed, darker roots, essentially imitating the look of real hair while assuming its position as fake hair. The Artisanal 2024 collection by John Galliano turned this concept intimate with the use of merkins. This ties back to Margiela’s questioning of the beauty ideal, especially within the tightly confined dogma of Paris in the ’90s. With a healthy dosage of nostalgia, Supreme’s recall of the wig with its high-and-mighty conceptual ideas of fashion, slapped with a $1,400 price tag, made it inevitable that this collector’s item would become part of fashion history, or even, re-history.

The Regrowth of Hair

While there has been an uprise in the use of hair in fashion this year, with surely more to come as we approach the Spring/Summer 2025 season, the characteristic element has always been a tool employed by designers. Dating back to the Surrealism movement in the early 20th century, where “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is sartorially appropriated into “This is not hair”; hair has been used to evoke questions of the standards of beauty, as well as exploring our deepest and darkest desires.

While Margiela’s ‘wig coat’ might be fashion’s most influential, hair has been enlisted by many of fashion’s greatest minds. Just to name a few, the ominous avant-garde designer Carol Christian Poell, for one, also created a hair tie for his Spring/Summer 2006 collection, whereas Helmut Lang and UNDERCOVER’s Jun Takahashi might have been unsuspected inspiration points for Simone Rocha’s recent Jean Paul Gaultier collection, both exploring hair on footwear for their Fall/Winter 2004 and Spring/Summer 2005 collections respectively. Then there’s D’heygere, the Paris-based accessories brand born in 2018, which regularly employs hair to create pieces, especially earrings, which explore the dichotomy between “luxury and ordinary, reality and representation”.

Ferris explains this phenomenon as “the fun in dressing up and escaping reality”. He goes on to say, “There is something extremely fetishistic, sensual, and erotic about hair, and those feelings go hand-in-hand with fashion, as is fashion’s relationship with art”. Whether it’s a direct reference to fetishism, a play on perception, or even still a subversion of societal norms, hair is here to play. While its appearance in the mainstream will most likely take form in distilled and subtle forms of accessories or decorative ornaments (we’re not holding out our breath for Wall Street bros to challenge Patrick Bateman’s stylistic status quo with a hair tie), the runway and conceptual takes on hair’s integration into fashion will always allow us to think and feel further than surface levels aesthetic.