What Comes After Rage-bait?
On the kids' orchestra at Margiela, Duran Lantink's Jean Paul Gaultier, and the rise of joy-bait
This Paris Fashion Week threw us all for a loop, didn’t it? Jonathan Anderson’s thoroughly debated first womenswear collection at Dior, Jack McCollough’s and Lazaro Hernandez’s juicy Loewe debut, Miu Miu’s aprons inspired by East German uniforms, The Row hair combs, and the first act of what’s promising to be Matthieu Blazy’s generational run at Chanel. And yet, the one moment I can’t stop thinking about is the kids’ orchestra playing delightfully off-key at Glenn Martens’s first ready-to-wear show at Margiela.
Let me set the scene — it’s a Saturday, I wake up late, I almost forget it’s Margiela day. I tune into the livestream just a few minutes early and see the unmanned orchestra setup in the middle of the venue that they clearly wanted us to see. Live music? Cool. I don’t think much of it. It gets quiet, the light brightens, and a fleet of children in oversized suits that look like they belong in their older siblings’ closets, runs out of the curtains and takes position at the orchestra stand. I scream out loud and start clapping in my living room — they got us good. The band makes a bunch of noise and for a second, I wonder — is this a bit or will they actually play the show? They play the show. They play the classics, all charmingly off-key. I can’t stop staring at their serious faces, I am overwhelmed by the sound, I am too distracted by the two young women banging on a giant drum in the back to pay attention to the clothes. But I am also having the time of my life!
Online, I’ve seen all kinds of interpretations. One commenter saw the perfomance as a metaphor for Martens’ team coming into a legendary fashion house, digging through the archives for the classics, and going through the awkward phase of figuring out how to take Martin’s work somewhere new. Another suggested it was a play on the design philosophy of the house — deconstructing the harmony of an orchestra.
To me, it boils down to a feeling — the pure child-like joy piercing through that room. The naiveté it takes to have the courage to take on the classics, get them not quite right, but keep playing them anyway. The privilege that is a patient audience that trusts your best intentions and cheers you on despite the imperfections. The idea that in this particular context, an abrasive sound can be so disarming and beautiful, and a flawless, beautiful sound would have been so boring! It puts a smile on a serious critic’s face. It strips an over-intellectualized form of expression down to the basics. It kicks fashion off its billion-dollar pedestal and reminds it of the days it was a quirky little art niche.
Getting to be playful is a privilege that’s only really accessible to those with certain level of skill and genuine love of the form. What you encounter much more often are performances and objects that exist somewhere between Duchamp-esque conceptual art and social media rage-bait — $600 logo tees, $700 flips flops, and a latex breastplate put on a male model closing an otherwise decent fashion show. The buzz they created was fun for a while. As i-D’s EIC
put it, “we enjoy things that make us mad the way a dog loves a chew toy.” Despite how annoying it may be, the impact of someone, like Demna, on youth culture, the industry, and the way people dress is undeniable — your fit, your ideas don’t have to be Balenciaga to have his name written all over them.And yet, as the world around us turned a lot more serious and sinister, the snarky nihilism that artists inevitably slip into when they optimize their work for discourse, started reading as not only cringe but offensive. The same week we fawned over Chanel’s reincarnation, we also spiraled about what the new Jean Paul Gaultier could have been. The poorly constructed takes on the iconic sailor hats and cone bras and a hairy nude male body printed on a head-to-toe bodysuit just felt like a shell of a statement that the audience was craving from a house that is so deeply embedded in queer and women’s history at a time when their rights and expression are under attack. It didn’t help that its new creative director Duran Lantink had bragged about refusing to learn how to make a pattern and enter the JPG archives.
Joy, happiness, and pleasure are shaping up to be the new creative North Star. “I think fashion is in a funny state. It grew very, very fast and it kind of hit a ceiling. Now fashion needs to rethink its own model,” Matthieu Blazy told BoF leading up to his Chanel debut. “It needs to go back to the product itself, the pleasure you have buying it, or the pleasure you have in-store trying on something that you love.”Glenn Martens echoed the same idea in his pre-PFW interview. “I am very much aware that when I work at Margiela, or at these runways shows, I am proposing clothes that are not going to be reachable or accessible to so many people, but I do know that a lot of people are dreaming through it because they are watching it forever and ever again on YouTube,” he told Imran Amed. “It’s all there to make people happy and to make people enjoy life.” At the same time, we watched Demna put his head down with a classic collection at Gucci, and the Olsen sisters defend The Row’s billion dollar evaluation with a sophisticated Summer 2026 lookbook.
That doesn’t mean there is little space for fun. If anything, the most punk thing you can do, given the current state of the world, is refuse to let it crush your spirit and take its fundamental joys away from you. The only way to stick the landing, however, in an environment where creative work is quick to be pulled apart into snarky commentary, is for your output to be so soaked in genuine love and care for your art that only a real cynic wouldn’t be moved by it, or at the very least, respect the effort. There is a lesson for the audience here too — real criticism, however harsh and honest, comes from a place of love and passion rather than in pursuit of attention and views. After all, we are all just kids stumbling through an awkward phase of trying in pursuit of creating a classic. Grace and patience are the only way we’ll get there.
IN THE MARGINS
Like everyone else, I was shook by tweed melting into beading, among other things at Chanel.
Sonja Jansen, who did the music production this Margiela show and has been working with Glenn Martens for a long time shared the BTS of training the kids’ orchestra:
