Maison Margiela, formerly Maison Martin Margiela, is a French luxury fashion house headquartered in Paris and founded in 1988 by Belgian designer Martin Margiela. The house produces both haute couture-inspired artisanal collections and ready-to-wear collections, with the former influencing the designs of the latter. Product lines include womenswear, menswear, fine jewelry, footwear, objects, fragrance, and home goods, among others. Known for deconstructive and avant-garde designs with unconventional materials, Maison Margiela has traditionally held live shows in unusual settings, for example empty metro stations and street corners.Models' faces are often obscured by fabric or long hair to direct attention to the clothes and design. With Maison Martin Margiela going public in 2002, Margiela resigned as creative designer in 2009 and John Gallianowas appointed to the role in 2014. The company has collaborated on displays and designs with Barneys New York, Converse, G-Shock,Opening Ceremony Hermès, H&M, L’Oreal, and Swarovski.Maison Margiela was founded by Martin Margiela, a Belgian fashion designer, in 1988. Earlier, Margiela had studied fashion at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, and although he actually graduated a year earlier, in 1979,he is often mistaken for a member of the university’s Avant-garde fashion collective the Antwerp Six. Among other influences, during the 1980s Margiela and other Belgian designers such as the Antwerp Six were inspired by deconstructive fashions introduced by Japanese avantgardists such as Rei Kawakubo—creator of the label Comme des Garçons. Margiela began utilizing the deconstructive style in the 1980s[ while a freelance designer in Milan, Italy, and early on his work would often reveal the garments’ structure, for example intentionally exposed linings and seams. In 1984 he became Jean Paul Gaultier’s design assistant in Paris, a role he held until 1987.In 1988, Martin launched his own self-titled design label Maison Martin Margiela with business partner and fellow designer Jenny Meirens. Initially working out of a Paris apartment, they opened their first store in an unmarked white space in Paris, also opening a small studio on 12 Leopoldstraat in Antwerp. New York Magazine wrote that "the designer quickly defined a deconstructed look [with his new label]… Vaguely Dadaist, as if Marcel Duchamp were reincarnated as a fashion designer, Margiela questioned every tenet of fashion and luxury."Vogue would later write that his early ideas "provoked shock and intrigue" in the fashion industry. On the label’s garments, simple blank white labels with four white tacks were sewn to signify the brand. Distinct product ranges were given numbers as signifiers, in no particular chronological order.With New York Magazine describing the label’s early shows as "perhaps more like art happenings than the thematic and operatic productions ‘80s Paris fashion is known for," in 1988, Maison Martin Margiela presented its debut womenswear collection in Paris. for the spring of 1989.Refusing to take bows at his live shows, Margiela began avoiding pictures and began handling all media via fax, with interviews taken collectively by the entire design team and correspondence signed with "we." Many in the fashion media contended that the anonymity was a publicity stunt, although Maison Martin Margiela asserted that Margiela's anonymity was a reaction to an overly commercialized fashion industr[not in citation given] and a genuine attempt to return the focus of fashion to the clothing, and not the personas behind it. The press dubbed Margiela the Greta Garbo of fashion as a result, a reference to Garbo’s similar avoidance of the spotlight, and in 2008 the New York Times called Margiela "fashion's invisible man."