MM6 Maison Margiela SS27 in Milan: a collection built to be repositioned on the body, shown inside the Italian stock exchange
A collection engineered so one garment can be worn in more than one place on the body, shown inside the Italian stock exchange.
Clothes come with instructions, even when nobody writes them down. A shirt goes on the torso. A skirt starts at the waist. The neckline circles the neck and the shoulder line sits on the shoulders. That is the house's own opening line for MM6 Maison Margiela's spring 2027 collection, and the collection spends its time disobeying it.
MM6 showed on 23 September at 17:00, inside the Borsa Italiana, the Italian stock exchange in Milan, in a setting staged strictly in black and white. The official Milan calendar gave the label a time and no address: its line read "location in the invitation", as did Jil Sander's that morning, while every other house on Wednesday's list printed a street or a "location TBC".
The question the house set itself was practical rather than conceptual: what happens when familiar things are worn differently? In womenswear, garments move around the body. A shirt becomes a skirt, its shoulder line sitting on the hips. A V-neck top can be worn as a bottom, or left as a top. A skirt turns into a dress with the waistline pushed high. Sometimes two versions of the same garment are put together to make a single look. Elsewhere an archetype simply moves to a different part of the body, with panels added where the new position needs them.
None of it is deconstruction, which is the easy assumption with this house. Pieces are folded, shifted and fastened again, and their original construction stays visible throughout. The house is explicit about why: the point is not to make a shirt stop looking like a shirt, but to see what else it can do.
The menswear moves sideways instead. On shirts, collars and the button strips down the front shift from the centre towards the side of the body. The wardrobe itself stays straightforward and utilitarian, tailored suits, biker jackets, shirts, T-shirts, trousers. What changes is where things begin and end.
What makes any of it wearable is hardware. Reduced closures, snaps, shrunken proportions and easy fabrics make a garment immediate to put on, take off and reposition, which is the difference between a runway idea and a piece somebody buys. The shrunken proportions have a source: enlarged disproportions of dolls' clothes, which is also where the belts come from. Surfaces are altered rather than replaced, with overdyes, starch treatments and painted, papery finishes. Normal clothes, specific treatments, as the house puts it.
The accessories follow the same logic. A glove becomes a bag, or is reimagined as a shoe with five toes. Another shoe carries glove stitch detailing. The Soft Bauletto can be carried as a bag or allowed to collapse and be held under the arm, almost like a piece of clothing. The object stays the same; the gesture changes it.
The Havaianas collaboration applies the principle to an archetype worn by millions, with the number six becoming a design mechanism rather than a name. The flip-flop splits into toes, grows an extra one, or multiplies into six differently shaped soles stacked one on top of another.
Worth noting where this sits: MM6 is one of five brands OTB says it powers, alongside Diesel, Jil Sander, Marni and Viktor&Rolf, with the group also holding a stake in Amiri. Four of those five were on the Milan calendar in a single week, Diesel on Tuesday at 16:00, Jil Sander on Wednesday at 10:30, MM6 at 17:00 the same day and Marni on Thursday at 14:00.
The collection does not ask for one new way of dressing. It proposes several, and leaves the wearer to decide where a garment belongs.