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Share with us... Your Best & Worst Collections of Haute Couture F/W 2025.26
Model Maria Loks' Fashion Week Illustrations
Seen through the prism of hourly newspaper updates, Instagrams and backstage tweets, the four-week extravaganza that surrounds the global fashion weeks come across as a dazzling frenzy of beautiful clothes, cocktails and non-stop parties, with the lucky models as the high-heeled hubs of glamour. So when AnOther asked Polish face Maria Loks to illustrate her experiences of the whirligig of New York's A/W13 shows, we got a highly personal insight into the experience of fashion week. Represented by Next Model Management, with outings for Chanel's couture show, Victoria Beckham and Marc Jacobs this season so far, Loks took the stretch of hours between fittings and walks to draw the faces of the models she befriended backstage, really looking at their faces and bringing them to life in an unusual way, while at the same time considering the new beauty looks for A/W13. Here she presents her vignettes, captioned with what she was waiting for while she did the drawing.
"When AnOther asked if I’d like to do some drawings about fashion week, I realised that the thing all shows have in common is the activity of waiting. For any two minute walk on the runway we do between three and six hours waiting, and it’s during this time that you have the most interesting conversations with the other girls, get to know their lives, dreams, ideas, or at least nationality and age if the person next to you is not very talkative.
So I came up with a serious of drawings of girls I've been waiting with during the show week. There is one drawing for every show I did in New York and since most of the waiting you do is while wearing full hair and make up, you get a look at the beauty ideas for next fall."
Maison Martin Margiela A/W13 by Maria Loks
Four white diagonal stitches, completing a hollow square; this ambiguous anti-label has become the iconic mark of Maison Martin Margiela, the "faceless" brand. Since launching in 1988, the label has inspired an architectural up-cycling approach to fashion, where classic silhouettes are torn, deconstructed and re-sewn with a continuing hanging sense of anonymity. Martin Margiela, who left the brand in 2009, was a mysterious character, rarely photographed or interviewed. The current design team remain equally incognito, with an cryptic question mark hanging over their identity.
In recent seasons, the brand has adopted various faces: the bejeweled crystal masks of A/W12 couture or the recent S/S13 couture candy-wrapper guises. S/S11 offered hair-swept hidden faces, while for their 20th Anniversary S/S09 collection models were de-faced by stockings and wigs. Margiela adopts a similar concept taken by architecture, where the sole purpose is to protect and shelter. Referencing the Trompe-l’oeil and surrealist painters of the past, the brand defines itself by objects and shapes as opposed to a person or a word.
Maria Loks, who documented her New York Fashion Week experience through a series of personal illustrations for AnOther Magazine, illustrates this concept below, after walking in the A/W13 show.
Text by Mhairi Graham