“For the next few weeks, my feeling is that our HQ isn’t in Paris anymore: it’s right here in China,” says Gaetano Sciuto. It is Saturday morning, and Sciuto, the CEO of Maison Margiela, delivers this announcement over coffee on the roof of the Lafayette Arts & Design Center in Shanghai. Alongside him is Glenn Martens, Margiela’s creative director, who pops up during a momentary lull in the action downstairs.
There, scores of blouson blanche-wearing colleagues are preparing for what will be the first-ever Maison Margiela show to be held outside Paris, since the house first held one in 1988. Happening on Wednesday in Shanghai, on the final day of fashion week, it will mix Martens’s latest ready-to-wear with new season looks from the house’s couture-level Artisanal line. “We are here to show what we do and who we are, and to set a foundation,” says Martens before he heads back into the creative fray.
Alongside Martens’s latest designs, that foundation will also rest upon Margiela’s history as fashion’s most unconventionally counter-cultural house. Over the next fortnight, Sciuto and Martens will oversee the unveiling of four exhibitions across China. The first will open on Friday, displaying 58 original pieces from the Artisanal line, on Yandang Road in Shanghai’s Huangpu District.
The looks on show will include several by Martens and his predecessor John Galliano, however the lion’s share have been drawn from the archive of house founder Martin Margiela himself. After Shanghai, the Margiela studio will move on to Beijing for a mask-heavy exhibition dedicated to the house’s philosophy of anonymity at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre. An already fully booked exhibition focused on the Tabi shoe will also open in a museum venue in Chengdu, in parallel with a display in Shenzhen dedicated to the house’s core Bianchetto leather treatment. Says Sciuto: “It’s about creating a real conversation with the people here. We’re not just in China to show product, but to share our attitude and our values. Those values usually involve taking a stand on things, and being direct and unconventional. That is the conversation we want to have.”
The China move is just the latest in a series of conversation-starters, which have followed Sciuto’s arrival in 2023. When he got the gig, he recalls: “Everybody was excited for me. All my friends in the industry were telling me how Margiela is so edgy, so unique, and so niche. While I like niche, I want Margiela to be in the middle of the conversation, not on the edge of it.”
The house has rarely been undiscussed since. In January 2024, Galliano showed his spectacular last Artisanal show, before exiting in December. Martens was announced as Galliano’s successor the following month, before showing his first Artisanal collectsion in July 2025, and then his first ready-to-wear collectsion last October.
The shift in creative oversight has coincided with a shift in communication that, Sciuto says, is epitomized by the digital release of Margiela Folders, an in-house Dropbox used to collate information, updates, and timelines related to the China show and the exhibitions that will follow it. Sciuto says: “It’s very unconventional, something nobody in fashion has ever done. Everybody else tries to be secretive and to create an aura that fashion is somehow unreachable. For us, it is the opposite. The folders effectively allow people to go into the backstage of the brand and really understand how things work.”
This philosophy of radical transparency, observes Sciuto, is consistent with the core nature of the house he is charged with leading. “Martin was always very direct,” he says of the house’s founder. “Very transparent in the things he did.” The CEO’s core challenge now is to scale Margiela commercially without diluting that original position. “That niche part already works,” Sciuto continues. “But we have to grow. The question is: how do you stay unique, how do you stay true to who you are, while growing?”
Martens’s first two collectsions have seen the revival of Artisanal’s client-facing activities, as well as its return to the Paris ready-to-wear schedule. These two growth drivers have since been followed by a (typically unconventional) pivot to China. Immediately exiting the Paris schedule one season after returning to it might seem a little cavalier, but Sciuto insists Margiela intends to return to the world’s most significant fashion week next September.
Sciuto felt this full-tilt foray into China was an absolute priority. Margiela only entered the country in earnest in 2019, he says. Though, the brand has since opened 26 stores there, with its market penetration, in the most part, defined by its perfume business. And it is this relative lack of development in China that has driven the decision to focus on the region.
Last year, Margiela’s total revenues grew 9%, of which only an (undisclosed) small proportion stemmed from the Chinese market. “This is why, for us, it is still an opportunity. Even if right now, the US, Europe, and Korea are growing faster in general, we feel China has really huge potential for us,” Sciuto says. He points to the recent opening of a Margiela flagship in Seoul having provided a spike in sales-generating awareness across the Korean market, which he hopes this endeavor will mirror in China. “In a similar way, that flagship has completely changed perception of the brand, because it allowed us to showcase a mix between communication, iconic product, and elevating Margiela as a luxury label.”
Product-wise, Sciuto says a focus on the house’s Tabi shoes has driven “exponential” growth. The arrival of Martens, he adds “has brought a more feminine and gendered approach. With John, it was a little more genderless.” Reflecting this, he adds, an emphasis on dresses and skirts is bearing early fruit in ready-to-wear, while other clients engage with the newly available Martens-era Artisanal couture. A cohort of these clients, Sciuto says, will be in Shanghai tomorrow to see the show. Because of this, he discloses, Maison Margiela will next return to the Paris Haute Couture schedule in January 2027.
At the other end of the business, MM6, the diffusion line that developed out of Martin Margiela’s 1997-founded Line 6, has 22 stores globally and contributes significant wholesale revenues to the brand’s overall bottom line. “It has been growing quite nicely,” says Sciuto, “but between Margiela and MM6, we are telling two different stories.” Nonetheless, he agrees, MM6 serves as an important transmitter of the broader cultural capital that Margiela possesses. Sciuto adds: “The Replica perfume and Replica sneakers have been such a success, so part of the question for us is how do we engage with those clients and bring them more deeply into the world of Maison Margiela?”
Before he was headhunted to join the OTB-owned house in 2023, Sciuto spent four years as CEO of Giorgio Armani’s Americas division. Prior to that, he served an 11-year stretch at LVMH Group’s Fendi, first as director of licensing and accessories, and later as president of Fendi Americas. There, he counts Fendi’s two successive CEOs, Michael Burke and Pietro Beccari, as formative influences. From Burke, Sciuto says, he learned that “the best time to invest is when things are difficult”. This has, in part, driven the conception of this Maison Margiela China initiative, which is understood to be one of the most costly brand amplifications in OTB’s recent history.
The group acquired Maison Margiela in 2002, under its founder and chair Renzo Rosso. According to Sciuto, the founder “didn’t flinch when we told them how much money we are going to spend in China. He said, ‘Go for it, it’s amazing, and it’s what people need now.’ And honestly, we are very fortunate that he gives the brand independence; as long as you are staying true to the house and the DNA, he is happy. Not every other group is like that.” Rosso will arrive in Shanghai today to attend tomorrow’s show, as well as the exhibition that will follow it.
As we prepare to call time on the chat, Sciuto adds: “I think none of the big brands would take on a project like this, because it is so complex and ambitious — and I’m proud that we did. The fact that we took it on shows that the name Only The Brave [OTB] is correct.”
Three of the four exhibitions are already fully subscribed, he added. “I told the team that maybe not everything that happens will necessarily go to plan,” says Sciuto. “But finding beauty in imperfection is something we embrace at Margiela. So whatever happens, even the fact that we are embarking on this, is a form of success.”
