Im in Maison Martin Margiela

Maison Martin Margiela Fall 2009 Men's: Menswear Fashion Collections on men.style.com: "Always artful in its presentations, the house of Margiela showed its Fall collection in a series of police lineup tableaux, like The Usual Suspects, with Noo Yawk voices straight from a detective show intoning the details of each outfit. It was a smart way to get across the collection's roots in the seventies, another era of economic hardship, when New York was on its knees and honest cops tried to clean up the mean streets. Hardly surprising, then, that it was easy to spin a story out of a trench, a jacket, a zipped boot that were treated to look rain-speckled (after a stakeout?). Leather jackets—one in shiny burgundy, another in a ten-pocketed tribute to the style of a bygone age—were also worthy of the wardrobe of our whistle-blowing cop.

Actually, that 'bygone' bit may have become a bit of a problem for Margiela menswear. Fashion archaeology is all well and good while it's dredging up tasty morsels of the past, but perma-pressed slacks were, are, and ever will be period pieces. And the pilling effect on a pair of jeans was simply silly. The most interesting pieces in the collection were the things that applied themselves to a design challenge, like the coat whose excess folds of fabric gave it a genuinely interesting volume, or the jacket with a multilayered shawl collar. The evening group was called 'After-Party,' and featured a shirt with a printed red wine stain. Fashion partied hard for the past decade. Now it's bracing itself for a long hangover."