OMA extends runway scenography to the city of Shanghai
OMA/AMO collaborates with Maison Margiela on MaisonMargiela/Folders, a multi-city report unfolding in Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Shenzhen until April 13, 2026. Designed as a distributed format, the plan translates the enduring codes of the house, known for its avant-garde designs, into spatial experiences scattered throughout the urban fabric, marking the first collaboration between the fashion label and the architecture studio led by Rem Koolhaas.
In Shanghai, this approach is implemented through a series of containers placed directly within the city. The intervention extends the scenographic language developed for the Maison Margiela Fall/Winter 2026 runway, also designed by OMA, where they stack containers formed a floating environment for the performance. Re-emerging as exhibition devices, the containers act simultaneously as archive, architecture and street interface.
all images courtesy of Maison Margiela
maison margiela’s distributed exhibition as a method
Instead of consolidating content into a single space, MaisonMargiela/Folders works through fragmentation. Each city becomes a “folder” dedicated to a specific code, forming a loose archive in which visitors browse across geographies and typologies. Street, theatre, gallery and sports infrastructure are redefined as exhibition environments, while digital material is simultaneously circulated through the brand’s interior Dropbox systemexpanding the project beyond its physical footprint.
This curatorial logic reflects both OMA’s long-standing preoccupation with exhibition-making as narrative construction and Maison Margiela’s own practice of deconstructing and reassembling meaning through clothing. In Shanghai, Artisanal: Our creative workshop occupies Yan Dang Street as an outdoor exhibition. Fifty-eight couture looks, spanning 1989 to 2026, are presented together for the first time, tracing the evolution of of the house craft line. The presentation follows Maison Margiela’s Fall/Winter 2026 runway show in the city, for which OMA designed the scenography as a sequence of stacked shipping containers placed in a floating environment, extending the brand’s spatial experimentation from runway to urban exhibition format. Organized through themes such as recycling, trompe l’oeil and the transformation of the everyday, the process of foregrounding the product.
Maison Margiela’s Artisanal: Our Creative Laboratory Unfolds Along Yan Dang Road in Shanghai
anonymity, tabi and bianchetto mapping across china
Set in Beijing’s Zhengyici Peking Opera House, Anonymity: Our History of Masks brings together forty-eight masks from across the brand’s history. Installed in a traditional performance space, the exhibition draws parallels between theatrical identity and Margiela’s long-standing rejection of visible authorship. The masks articulate a lineage of disguised identity that has defined the maison since its inception.
In Chengdu, Tabi: The Collectors exhibition shifts the focus from the atelier to its audience. Hosted at the Third Avenue Museum of Art, the exhibition reconstructs the wardrobes of nine collectors, offering an intimate perspective into the life of the iconic Tabi silhouette beyond the catwalk. Through personal archives, Tabi becomes less of an object and more of a living system, constantly reinterpreted through individual narratives and acts of collection. In Shenzhen, Bianchetto: Atelier Experience occupies an unexpected setting, transforming a badminton court into a collaborative workspace. Focusing on the house’s characteristic coating technique, the installation stages the atelier as both a process and a performance. Here, creation is exhibited as an ongoing act rather than an end result, aligning with the wider exhibition’s emphasis on transparency, transformation and the unfinished.
In its four locations, MaisonMargiela/Folders positions exhibition creation as a form of indexing rather than display. Each “folder” isolates a piece of code while remaining part of a larger, distributed system that resists hierarchy and invites movement between fragments. OMA / AMO and Maison Margiela extend the logic of deconstruction from the garment to the scale of the city, where meaning is gathered through circulation.
expanding the Autumn/Winter 2026 runway scenography of the house in the city
Couture looks from 1989 to 2026 are displayed in container structures
the outdoor installation places sewing in public space
an outdoor installation designed by OMA
The exhibition Tabi: Collectors is on display at the Third Avenue Art Museum in Chengdu
stacked shipping containers formed a floating environment for the performance
project information:
name: MaisonMargiela/Envelopes
architect: OMA/AMO | @oma.eu
brand: Maison Margiela | @maisonmargiela
chief architect: Rem Koolhaas (OMA)
locations: Shanghai — Yan Dang Road, Beijing — Zhengyici Peking Opera House, Chengdu — Third Avenue Art Museum, Shenzhen — Hairun Badminton Courts
dates: Shanghai: April 2-6 | Beijing: April 7-12 | Chengdu: April 9 – 13 | Shenzhen: April 11 – 12
production: Fashion in pictures | @lamodeenimages
