Martin Margiela: The Artist is Absent

One of the premieres at the current TriBeCa Film Festival is a mini-documentary on Martin Margiela, “The Artist is Absent,” directed by Alison Chernik. How do you make a documentary about a designer notoriously recluse? You interview other important people.

Among them, Jean-Paul Gaultier, the designer who gave Margiela his first job, the fashion critic Suzy Menkes, Raf Simons, who credits seeing a Margiela show for the first time with his desire to become a fashion designer, and our dear friend, the Belgian makeup artist Inge Grognard, who did the makeup for those iconic early Margiela’s shows.