Dazed revisits a stunning 2006 Margiela shoot that still feels ahead of its time

There's something quietly thrilling about a fashion archive pull done right - and Dazed's latest dig through its 30-year print history delivers exactly that. The magazine has resurfaced a shoot from its March 2006 issue, featuring artists Gillian Wearing, Alexis Marguerite Teplin, Goshka Macuga, and Jane and Louise Wilson, all dressed in Maison Martin Margiela.

The timing is worth noting. The shoot landed during a Paris Spring/Summer season that was, by Dazed's own description, anything but shy - even by the usually elevated standards of that fashion world. Margiela, of course, was never a house that played it safe. The Belgian designer built his reputation on deconstruction, anonymity, and a deep resistance to the spectacle that fashion so often demands of itself. Putting artists - rather than models - at the centre of a shoot feels entirely on brand.

Why this still matters

Fashion archives have had a serious cultural moment lately. As interest in pre-digital fashion history grows - fuelled partly by a broader nostalgia for early 2000s aesthetics and partly by a genuine hunger for substance over scroll - shoots like this one take on new relevance. This wasn't editorial fashion as escapism. It was fashion as dialogue, with the artistic world rather than apart from it.

Gillian Wearing, perhaps the most internationally recognised name in the lineup, is known for work that interrogates identity and performance. That sensibility pairs almost too well with Margiela's own preoccupations - the house famously obscured its own logo, sent models down the runway in masks, and treated fashion itself as a kind of conceptual art practice.

The other artists - Teplin, Macuga, and the Wilson sisters - bring their own distinct practices to the frame, making the shoot feel less like a celebrity campaign and more like a group show that happened to involve very good tailoring.

Worth a proper look

Dazed has shared a gallery of 16 images alongside the revisit, which makes this one genuinely worth clicking through rather than just reading about. Whether you're a Margiela obsessive, an art world follower, or simply someone who appreciates fashion that has actual ideas behind it, this Archive Pull is a reminder of what editorial could do when given the space to breathe.

Twenty years on, it still holds up.