Martin Margiela

The 1980s section's deconstruction entry ends with Martin Margiela's first collection in 1988. The 1990s are where his ideas were fully developed, and I think he's the decade's most original designer, even though most people have never seen his face.

Margiela was born in Belgium in 1957 and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the school that also trained the group of designers who became known as the "Antwerp Six." From the mid-1980s he worked as an assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris before launching his own label, Maison Martin Margiela, with his business partner Jenny Meirens.

Anonymity was central. He didn't give face-to-face interviews or pose for photographs, and the house spoke as "we." The label inside the clothes was a plain white rectangle of fabric, often blank or printed with a row of numbers, attached with four visible white stitches - a direct rejection of the logo-obsessed fashion around it. His shows were held in unusual places, like abandoned buildings, a Salvation Army building, and a disused Paris metro station, with models whose faces were often veiled or hidden.

His clothes questioned how fashion is made. He left hems unfinished, exposed linings and shoulder pads, and printed garments with the image of other clothes. He remade old things into new ones: military socks became a sweater, vintage dresses and gloves were reworked, and flea-market finds were taken apart and reassembled, an early form of fashion upcycling. He played with scale, enlarging garments to extreme sizes and oversizing familiar pieces. His Tabi boot, with its split toe inspired by Japanese tabi socks, first shown in his debut collection, became a cult object.

From 1997 to 2003 he also designed womenswear for the old French luxury house Hermès, where his quiet, beautifully made, deeply comfortable clothes surprised people who knew him only as an avant-garde provocateur. I think that combination says a lot: Margiela's work was never just about breaking things. It was about looking hard at how clothes are made and worn, and at what we value in them - and those questions still shape fashion today.