REALITY SHOW

Glenn Martens, the new creative director of Maison Margiela, is bringing his own signature irreverence to the avant-garde brand, finding inspiration in moments of quotidian beauty

- JACK MOSS

On a still-warm Paris day last October, sunlight streamed through the vaulted glass ceiling of the Centquatre, an arts centre in the 19th arrondissement, where guests had gathered for Glenn Martens' first ready-towear show for Maison Margiela.

A former funeral parlour, completed in the late 1800s, the vast main hall had been transformed for the occasion: sheathed in trompe l'oeil white curtains and lined with benches - themselves wrapped in white fabric - the scene included a 61-piece orchestra, at that point empty of its players (this was also rendered in white, from its music stands to a dramatic grand piano, a nod to house founder Martin Margiela's favoured hue). Such was the piercing brightness, many of the attendees kept on their sunglasses or simply squinted into the light.

Then arrived the orchestra: a merry band of children, clutching instruments and clad in ill-fitting suits, some so large that the hemlines dragged along the ground like the train of a dress.

They then played with gusto, blasting through classical music's greatest hits - from the booming Sunrise fanfare from Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra to Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 - as models, lips prised open with metal mouthpieces, began to parade around the space.

The sound was deliriously off-key and out of time, but the children were charming (hailing from Romilly-surSeine and aged seven to 15, they are part of Orchestre à l'École, which turns local classrooms into orchestras; some had been learning for just a few months).

There is a famous photograph of Martin Margiela's S/S90 runway show, held in 1989 in an abandoned playground in Paris' zoth arrondissement, then largely populated by North African immigrants.