Martin Margiela

Martin Margiela's 20th-anniversary show, fall 2008 The quietest exit here, and fittingly so for a designer who made a point of never attending his own shows. The show asked what was left after twenty years, forty shows and hundreds of garments, and answered with a greatest-hits retrospective of the house's ideas. Accounts date it to late September or October 2008. He retired from fashion the following year without fanfare. Watched now, it reads as a designer saying goodbye in the only way that suited him: through the clothes, never in person.