Is that him? – the question many guests were asking at last week’s private view of Maison Margiela’s work over the last 20 years. A near impossible question to answer as the Belgian iconoclast, known for his designs where the inner workings of a garment are as likely to be on the outside as hidden, is notoriously shy. Elusive even. Margiela never gave an interview or stood in front of a camera – he left the creative helm of the brand in 2008. The label lives on without him.

There have often been rumours that Margiela may not have been a man at all but rather a collective, a group of design talent that created ‘him’ as a name to design behind – a simulacrum of a real fashion person. It’s a bit like the pop group Gorillaz, but without knowing who the band members are at all.

The exhibition avoids a chronological approach. Rather, it groups clothes together around ideas or concepts. So there are flat garments that are only given shape when they’re worn, trompe l’oeil effects – garments printed with photos of themselves onto the fabric (a photograph of a shirt onto a shirt, for instance) and painted clothes. These feature white paint, a kind of signature of the brand, painted onto them. This desecration often happens to Margiela’s shoes too. Interiors of the company’s shops and much of the furniture inside is treated in the same way. Then it’s left. The decay of white paint is a conceptual device to show the demise of purity. Perhaps. Or maybe it’s an eco-point: look how grubby the city is!

According to the exhibition’s programme however, “the layer of white paint creates the illusion of a neutral canvas, as if the Maison wanted to establish its own tabula rasa with history,” a quote so full of itself I bet it can even self-email direct to Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. It also reveals how seriously this brand takes itself. These are high-concept clothes for creative folk who see themselves in equally conceptual terms. Sexy doesn’t come into it.

The most intriguing line produced by the Maison is the ‘Replicas’. They take an original vintage garment, copy it faithfully, insert a label stating the item’s style, provenance and original date and leave off the Maison Martin Margiela label. This is because the brand no longer sees itself as the garment’s ‘author’. So a replica of a doctor’s coat from the Spring Summer 2005 collection for instance says that it’s a copy of one from 1920 from France. This baffling conundrum of ‘authorship’ feels more like sub-plot of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose than a commercially produced collection of clothing. It’s also pretty amusing.

“I spent a whole day with Margiela once,” said Sarah Mower, of Style.com looking out over the river on the terrace of Somerset House after the show. So he does exist then? “Oh yes, in fact Phoebe Philo at Celine has taken a number of his designers to work with her there since Margiela has now left his own label.” Which got me thinking. Could Phoebe Philo have been Martin Margiela all along? Now that really would be conceptual.

We’ve spoken about brands who straddle the lines between classic menswear and streetwear before and here’s one more to add to the ever lengthening list. While brands like the recently mentioned Henrik Vibskov skewer the designs, Danish label Wood Wood are more interested in tweaking them.

Founded in 2003, the Scandinavian label was founded by Karl Oskar Olsen and Brian Jensen. The duo met in Danish Design Academy and started out with a t-shirt line, eventually moving the line into their own store. The store was a wood-panelled wine store and this led to the store, and eventually brand, being named Wood Wood. In an interview with Format, Oskar-Olsen alluded to the original vision behind the brand.

“We wanted to make something that reflected all the brands in our store. From brands like Bernhard Willhelm, to Comme Des Garcons, to Maharishi, to Nike. Then we came up with the style we are working on now and the consumer we think is the most interesting.”

While collaborations aren’t as prized as they once were, Wood Wood have gained a reputation for working on several respected ones. Collaborating with everyone from Nike to Lego to Happy Socks, they’ve been able to work on several collaborations whilst not diluting their brand.

Whilst other brands of Wood Wood’s ilk choose trade shows as their stomping grounds, they’ve decided to to go the fashion show route, even showing at New York. Olsen stated that, “I believe that we tried to break borders ever since we started up and focused internationally instead of going big in little Denmark, which is fairly easy. Therefore, I think it makes sense to the crowd that follows us that we were representing at NYC Fashion Week, even if we are not so ‘fashion’.”

Like Henrik Vibskov, Wood Wood see being based in Copenhagen as double edged sword. “Copenhagen is a good city to work from, it’s cheap and very small. Everything is just around the corner, I don’t think it has ever affected our process negatively. I always thought we had a bigger impact on the city than the city had on us. The bad thing about Denmark though is that Copenhagen especially is such a small city and everybody seems to know each other”. Karl goes on to say, “I would love to see a guy like Henrik Vibskov move to Paris or New York; I think he’s got the kind of label that really could climb high if he was more visible in the centre of fashion.”

An outspoken interviewee, Oskar-Olsen’s advice for aspiring labels was blunt in an interview with Slam X Hype, “Honestly, wait until the recession is over, and then find an extremely wealthy old lawyer who can set you up big time.”

With education from the likes of Central St. Martins and Istituto Marangoni of Milan and awards from the Pitti committee, the German born, Milan based designer Umit Benan has made a great deal of waves in a very short time.

The epitome of well travelled, Benan, who studied in Istanbul, London and Milan as well as living in New York, has settled back in Milan. The entire collection is made in Italy and his relationship with the owners is so tight knit that he used the factory owner as a model for his first collection.

The first winner of Pitti Immagine’s ‘Who Is On Next’ menswear award, Benan originally found it difficult living in sharply tailored Milan. In an interview with Dazed and Confused he said that “I faced a lot of problems in Milan since the city revealed itself to me as a very narrow-minded place”. It was these problems that inspired his debut collection. However he did go on to say in an Interview magazine article that “When you are accepted here, you’re basically one of very few and unique”.

As for the clothes themselves, Benan’s are surprisingly normal for a fashion collection. While a great deal of fashion takes pride in creating menswear that challenges men, that often just ends up with clothes that don’t look good on people. While the styling in the collection may put the regular fashion-fearing off, if you look closely at each individual piece of clothing, they’re far more wearable than first imagined.

With retired rockers the focus of his autumn/winter 2010 collection, people have started to notice his fondness for the older gentleman. When asked about this he said, “When I look at older men, I get a picture of the past, and it’s a strong one in the case of my characters. They’ve experienced life and that allows me to write and create my own story.  It’s hard for me to design based on a beautiful young guy.  It’s not that it won’t happen, but at the moment these old cats are more than fine for me.”

A longstanding civil war in menswear has been between the fashion forward folks and the lovers of classics. For the most part, Scandinavian brands tend to veer towards the latter, but there are a few fighting for the other side. One such designer is Henrik Vibskov, a man who only entered Central St. Martins to impress a girl.

‘I met this really hot girl who was applying to Central Saint Martins. I wasn’t completely sure what the school was all about, but I’d heard of the place,’ he said in an interview with Fader magazine. ‘I put together a portfolio, bought a ticket, went to London for the first time, did the interview for the menswear course and got in’.

Prior to this whimsical application, Vibskov played in a band, saying that it’s the attitude from music that influences his collection moreso than any central theme or inspiration. ‘I think the idea of attitude coupled with style really feeds in to what I do now. Not that my stuff looks rock & roll or anything—but it is about creating an identity, and much of that comes from music.’

Aside from fashion and music, Vibskov also puts on art exhibitions, the most recent one being his ‘graphics works’ exhibition in Berlin. When he was asked about merging fashion and art in a recent Farfetch interview he said, ‘No, I don’t even think in those categories… I follow my ideas and then work out in which project they fit.’

With collection titles including ‘The Solar Donkey Experiment’, ‘The Human Laundry collection’ and ‘The Big Wet Shiny Boobies Collection’, you can be sure that his clothes are an acquired taste. But what surprises most about Vibskov’s collection is just how wearable they are. While they’ll never be as classic as a navy jumper, the clothes do have a far wider audience than most fashion forward clothing lines.

While the need to create something that people actually want to wear, as opposed to things that people will just appreciate from a distance may be a factor in all this, there’s also the fact he doesn’t see himself as part of fashion, ‘I really don’t think of myself as a fashion person and maybe that’s the problem. I just feel pretty normal.’

More pictures after the jump.

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Whether it’s doing it like Acne and mixing film amongst their clothing or being like Kitsune and running a record label, some brands function better as part of a creative collective. With their fingers in music, art and film, Uniforms for the Dedicated are the latest example of a collective fulfilling their potential.

The collective itself started around 2004, with the Swedish team originally meeting in the USA. One of the founders, Fredrik Wilholm states that ‘We actually got to know each other living together in Colorado snowboarding, basically starting out as a travelling collective’. It wasn’t until 2008 that the clothing collection started, with the video and art sides not starting until early 2009.

The clothes themselves are influenced by historic reference points and given tweaks and twists to bring them in line with the rest of their collection. Using family owned factories in Turkey and China, they focus on fabrics that can achieve the look they strive for. “Materials, whatever we find, like and can afford, mohair, wool, leather, cotton twills, synthetics, a lot of canvas. We spend a lot of time on washes that looks Uniforms – they might not be the most crazy expensive raw material but we work and treat it to get the right look and hand feel.”

When it comes to the oft-stressed topic of prestige not being enough to warrant a high price anynore Fredrik states, “We believe that everybody need to question their brand existence, what´s unique in your product and what the customer actually gets in relation to what she/he pays for. Recession or not I think we live in a time when consumers in general have the confidence and knowledge to create a subjective opinion about the product living up to the price or not.”