By Raquel Fernand
Maison Margiela and Gentle Monster return with the third chapter of their eyewear collaboration — a striking meditation on the intersection of classicism and futurism, where artisanal heritage dissolves into digital avant-garde. Launching globally on March 6, 2025, the collection is unveiled through a campaign by Jordan Hemingway, accompanied by ephemeral installations across select cities—spatial reveries where human presence flirts with cybernetic mystique.
Comprising twenty radical silhouettes—eight sunglasses and twelve spectacles—the collection fractures tradition through an architectural lens, reshaping the familiar with an exacting cybernetic precision. At its core, the MM201 revives the enigma of Maison Margiela’s L’Incognito (2008), now reengineered into a frameless, mask-like shield in silver and green. The MM202 and MM203 elongate this vision into goggle-like structures, their contours slicing through space in black, silver, and red, while the MM204 and MM205 extract robotic futurism from the elegance of oval silhouettes. Three temple-widened designs—the MM206, MM207, and
MM208—deconstruct archetypal eyewear into sleek, sharpened manifestations in black, red,
navy, and tortoiseshell.
The narrative of weightlessness unfolds in super-light metallic constructions, where the
MM216, MM218, and MM220 refine the oval form into spectral gold and silver frames.
Frameless optical compositions—the MM217 and MM219—hover on barely-there cable temples, reducing eyewear to an apparition. Elsewhere, the MM209, MM210, MM211, and MM212 subvert classical lenses into sculptural distortions, culminating in the MM213, a stretched cat-eye carved from shadow and light. Two final silhouettes—each affixed to silver-tagged wire temples—blur the
boundary between spectacle and artifact.
To commemorate the launch, immersive installations transpose the collection’s aesthetic into three-dimensional form. Abstract humanoid figures, draped in raw, deconstructed materials, stand suspended in a state of kinetic restraint, their presence juxtaposed against vast architectural volumes. The cable temple structures, a defining motif, weave discreetly into the space, dissolving eyewear into its own environment—where vision is not merely observed, but inhabited.
