Review of Maison Margiela “The Dress-Age Bag” Spring 2025 Ad Campaign by Photographer Szilveszter Mako
Maison Margiela introduces its new icon-in-the-making with the launch of the Dress-Age bag—an elegantly cerebral accessory that fuses heritage craftsmanship with conceptual design. Unveiled as part of the Spring–Summer 2025 Avant-Première Collection, the silhouette plays not only with form but with language, embodying the Maison’s continued dialogue between unconscious gesture and constructed meaning. Its very name, a deconstructed portmanteau, folds in themes of timeless dress codes, age, and artifice, echoing Margiela’s ongoing fascination with the codes of the bourgeoisie and the idea of fashion as behavior.
Shot by Szilveszter Mako, the accompanying campaign strips back theatricality to focus on texture, posture, and mood—allowing the bag’s quiet complexity to unfold. Rendered in deeply tactile pebbled calfskin with bonded camoscio suede interiors, the Dress-Age presents as a paradox: structured yet fluid, formal yet emotionally charged. Adjustable handles—anchored with hidden magnets—drape organically over its sculptural edges, evoking the slouched elegance of a coat shrugged over one’s shoulders. It’s a visual articulation of what the brand refers to as “unconscious glamour”—a term that feels particularly apt here.
What makes the Dress-Age compelling is not merely its material quality or modular styling, but its subtle invocation of mid-century sensibilities filtered through a postmodern lens. Margiela’s references to “inverted snobbery” and “reverse swatching” aren’t just theoretical provocations—they’re embedded in the bag’s construction, from the inside-out suede lining to the sugherite-reinforced straps that are as functional as they are symbolic. These details reinforce the bag’s narrative: a rejection of overstatement in favor of nuanced elegance, where the hidden becomes the exalted.
In a season of spectacle, Margiela delivers something more introspective. The Dress-Age is less a bag and more a study in behavioral semiotics—where every slouch, drape, and material choice speaks volumes in whispered tones.
Photographer | Szilveszter Mako