… today, much of Western society has gone from meeting their needs to gorging on disposable clothes. Take a weekend stroll on London’s Oxford Street or on New York’s Broadway and witness hordes of teenagers on their weekly shopping pilgrimages courtesy of mass-market retailers.

For this audience, ‘clothes’ are not cool enough. ‘Fashion’ is what lures young people into stores, which is the raison d’être behind these designer collaborations. But make no mistake, what is called ‘the democratisation of fashion’ is really the bastardisation of fashion; that is, taking a designer’s ideas and watering them down for mass consumption.

Real style is a matter of taste. And taste is a matter of experience. Just like one’s tastes in music, art or books, taste in clothes forms over time. It takes effort and knowledge. Buying into a style, quickly and cheaply, inevitably leads to the disposability of style. It’s like reading the Cliff’s Notes instead of the book.

Search YouTube for “H&M collaborations.” You’ll see bleary-eyed kids lining up hours before stores open in order to get some “designer” bargains. In one such video, a young gentleman says he arrived at H&M nine hours before the launch of the Comme des Garçons for H&M collaboration because “Comme des Garçons is a cool brand.”

Ironically, such brand worship was exactly what Maison Martin Margiela was against. For years Margiela was a designer’s designer, an intelligent creator and a pioneer of deconstruction who refused to talk to the media, letting his work speak for itself. The tags on his garments did not carry his name, but were pure white. He was a tinkerer, a sartorial engineer whose clothes often concealed their complexity.

Linda Loppa, head of Florentine fashion school Polimoda and former director of the fashion department at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, wrote via email: “It only appears on the surface that the Margiela concept can easily be replicated, In fact, the garments are not simple. The patterns require a lot of skill; the tailoring a lot of knowledge and attention to detail.”

In 2002, Margiela sold his company to Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group, which also owns Victor & Rolf and Diesel. Then, in December of 2009, he left the brand. And today, we have H&M x MMM. Two opposites have met. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees the paradox.

By all means, if you are willing to buy into this collaboration, please do, just don’t think that you are buying ‘fashion’ or a part of Margiela’s legacy — what you are buying are assembly-line knockoffs that you will discard by next year. But if this has become your idea of fashion, I urge you to reconsider.

(excerpt from: Eugene Rabkin / editor-in-chief of StyleZeitgeist magazine)