The campaign and short film ANONYMITY, for the fall/winter 2026 season, ranks among the darkest projects in Maison Margiela’s history. Under the direction of Thibaut Grevet, the house transformed an ordinary fashion ad into a trailer for a fictional psychological thriller. It doesn’t actually exist. British actress Rebecca Hall stars in the two-minute film.
When the face disappears, who remains
The plot follows Rebecca Hall as a successful actress preparing for a new role. The atmosphere thickens quickly. It shifts into horror-thriller territory the moment the heroine starts encountering her own masked double in ordinary daily life. This double appears in the exact same outfits as her. Each time, however, she wears a different, unique mask from the Artisanal line. These are made directly in Maison Margiela’s Paris atelier. The film, moreover, works with openly horror-inflected elements, bleeding screens, mysterious liquid, and figures emerging from wardrobes.
The campaign, at the same time, follows on from the exhibition Anonymity: Our History of Masks, which Maison Margiela staged in Beijing. It thus explores the conflict between visibility and the desire to disappear on a deeper, psychological level.
Crossover: Rebecca Hall knows dual identity from behind the camera too
Rebecca Hall, after all, isn’t just an actress in front of the lens. In 2021, she made her own directorial debut. Her film Passing deals with the theme of racial identity. It also explores “passing” between two versions of oneself. This casting choice, then, reads as more than a random pick of a famous face. She brings, in other words, her own lived experience of the theme the campaign plays with.
Masks as a legacy of deconstructivism
The philosophy of anonymity, however, isn’t new for Margiela. It reaches back to the late 1980s. Deconstructivism was taking hold in architecture at the time, associated with names like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas. This movement, in fact, broke apart traditional ideas of clean lines and symmetry. Martin Margiela did essentially the same thing in fashion. He turned garments inside out. He exposed linings, shoulder pads, and raw hems. What was meant to stay hidden thus became the main visual element. The Bianchetto technique carries the same principle, a white coating on leather that gradually peels away with wear.
When clothing becomes an artwork
Margiela has long drawn on conceptual art and Dadaism too. In 1997, he exhibited a collection not on a runway, but at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam. Working with a microbiologist, the exhibition, titled 9/4/1615, infected eighteen iconic outfits with bacteria and mold. The garments then stood for four days in greenhouses on the museum grounds, where the organisms, quite literally, “consumed” them.
The colour of the clothes gradually shifted to mossy green or ochre. When the exhibition opened, visitors looked through glass at models exposed to the weather, as if they were “melancholic ghosts.” It was, in other words, pure process-based art, sitting close to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade principle, which likewise turned ordinary objects into art through the sheer gesture of exhibiting them.
After leaving fashion in 2009, Martin Margiela moved fully into visual art. In 2021, he therefore held a major solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris. There, he showed sculptures, installations, and collages on the very same themes, anonymity, hidden faces, and disappearance.
A collection built around deconstruction
The fall/winter 2026 collection itself was first shown live at a runway show in Shanghai, staged among stacked shipping containers. Edwardian frock coats meet a second-skin-like material here. Dresses made from furniture upholstery fabric, meanwhile, create the illusion of liquid draping. White cracked skirts carry the aforementioned Bianchetto coating. New versions of the iconic Tabi shoe with floral prints join the lineup, along with the futuristic Tabi Claw model, a new Link bag inspired by archival coin purses, and finally chunky chain jewellery made from vacuum-formed leather.
Where and how
The film ANONYMITY is available online. The fall/winter 2026 collection is gradually arriving in stores.
