Patrick Scallon, communications director

[02:28:46.29] PATRICK: And the situation with the Vogue picture with Annie Lebowitz, to have the empty chair. That empty chair, which is a chair that I used…it was always in Jenny’s office. It was a big chair, and I was going to steal it actually the night that I left. Because when I said I had no going away party I was going to fucking take the chair…But I thought no…leave it behind. ehm…Annie Lebowitz, the night before the thing…no two nights before the thing her assistant phoned me up if there isn’t any physical representation of Martin Margiela in the thing, Annie is not going to take the picture. because Annie takes pictures of stars. And he is the star.

[02:29:31.00] mint: but can we have that…you can not tell this on the camera?

[02:29:34.15] PATRICK: I can. (…) I have to say, that picture was quite odd. Because…it was a long time on the plan, and we were doing a dossier of independant designers. We knew that they were going to be doing people like Viktor and Rolf, they were going to be doing Cavalli… We knew that they were going to be picturing the Belgium designers as a group in Antwerp. But we had this issue, because initially it came to us as a portret of Martin. But like typical Margiela, we said it had to be the entire team and Martin couldn’t be in the picture.

[02:38:57.03] PATRICK: We took this decision that was also validating for everybody in the team. We were going to take…almost like a class picture. Initially I’d been pushing that it should be a little bit more random. All these chairs…but Annie Leibowitz was completely correct, if it wasn’t quite a formal picture we wouldn’t fit everybody in the frame. (…) But…two days before… it was a Sunday, I was in Ireland. And the conversation happened…that unless Martin was going to be in the picture it wouldn’t happen. And this is another incidence of when we were confronted with possibly the ambiguity of what we had become, in a sense that it wasn’t enough for her to take a picture of the team of somebody, without that person being in place. So…basically there was an insistence of the physicality of martin in the situation. So we have this beautiful sort of chair, well I found it beautiful…It was a chair that was always in front of jenny’s office and in fact it had been her’s in her former office. And again this is were you get into that situation of being…not compromised but having to work with people. Because you know, we were a bigger company and also was very validating. And Martin’s work and in his presence as an independent company, the company that Jenny and Martin had built together. We deserved to be in it, or they deserved to be in it. (…) I remember speaking with Jenny, and the deal was struck that we would accept that the…the chair would be there. It’s everyone standing…and then in the front row Axel is there… Jenny’s there. I’m there. And the picture happened, it was published and we used to put all of our press up on the wall. We’d do this big collage. (…) And I remember standing on the corridor with Martin, we were looking at the press or whatever and we’re just going trough things and what we liked and what we didn’t like or what he liked and didn’t like…then we came to this picture, it was up on the wall. And you know, for him it was actually sort of a little bit insulting in a way. Insulting is probably a word that i’m using know, it’s not necessarily a word he used at the time. But he felt, you know, i’m presented by an absence. I’m not presented by a presence. And in that second he said it, I went oh my god we were caught at our own game in a way. Because this was the first and only time that under my watch…that we had played the mystery game.