OMA extends runway scenography into the city of Shanghai
OMA / AMO collaborates with Maison Margiela on MaisonMargiela/Folders, a multi-city exhibition unfolding across Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Shenzhen until April 13th, 2026. Conceived as a distributed format, the project translates the enduring codes of the house, known for its avant-garde designs, into spatial experiences dispersed across the urban fabric, marking the first collaboration between the fashion label and the architecture studio led by Rem Koolhaas.
In Shanghai, this approach materializes through a sequence of shipping containers positioned directly within the city. The intervention extends the scenographic language developed for Maison Margiela’s Fall/Winter 2026 runway, also designed by OMA, where stacked containers formed a navigable environment for the show. Reappearing as exhibition devices, the containers operate simultaneously as archive, architecture, and street interface.
all images courtesy of Maison Margiela
maison margiela’s distributed exhibition as method
Rather than consolidating content within a single venue, MaisonMargiela/Folders operates through fragmentation. Each city becomes a ‘folder’ dedicated to a specific code, forming a loose archive that visitors navigate across geographies and typologies. Street, theatre, gallery, and sports infrastructure are repurposed as exhibition settings, while digital materials circulate simultaneously through the brand’s internal Dropbox system, extending the project beyond its physical footprint.
This curatorial logic reflects both OMA’s long-standing engagement with exhibition-making as narrative construction and Maison Margiela’s own practice of dismantling and reassembling meaning through garments. In Shanghai, Artisanal: Our Creative Laboratory occupies Yan Dang Road as an open-air exhibition. Fifty-eight couture looks, spanning from 1989 to 2026, are presented together for the first time, tracing the evolution of the house’s artisanal line. The presentation follows Maison Margiela’s Fall/Winter 2026 runway in the city, for which OMA designed the scenography as a sequence of stacked shipping containers arranged into a navigable environment, extending the brand’s spatial experimentation from the runway into the urban exhibition format. Organized through themes such as upcycling, trompe l’oeil, and the transformation of the everyday, the display foregrounds process over product.
Maison Margiela’s Artisanal: Our Creative Laboratory unfolds along Yan Dang Road in Shanghai
mapping anonymity, tabi, and bianchetto across china
At Beijing’s Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre, Anonymity: Our History of Masks assembles forty-eight masks from across the brand’s history. Installed within a traditional performance venue, the exhibition draws parallels between theatrical identity and Margiela’s longstanding rejection of visible authorship. The masks articulate a lineage of obscured identity that has defined the maison since its inception.
In Chengdu, Tabi: Collectors Exhibition shifts the focus from the atelier to its audience. Hosted at the Third Avenue Art Museum, the exhibition reconstructs the wardrobes of nine collectors, offering an intimate perspective on the life of the iconic Tabi silhouette beyond the runway. Through personal archives, the Tabi becomes less an object and more a lived system, continuously reinterpreted through individual narratives and acts of collecting. In Shenzhen, Bianchetto: Atelier Experience occupies an unexpected setting, transforming a badminton court into a collective workspace. Centered on the house’s signature overpaint technique, the installation stages the atelier as both process and performance. Here, making is exposed as an ongoing act rather than a finished outcome, aligning with the broader exhibition’s emphasis on transparency, transformation, and the unfinished.
Across its four locations, MaisonMargiela/Folders positions exhibition-making as a form of indexing rather than display. Each ‘folder’ isolates a 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 garment to city scale, where meaning is assembled through circulation.
extending the scenography of the house’s Fall/Winter 2026 runway into the city
couture looks from 1989 to 2026 are displayed within container structures
the open-air installation situates couture within the public realm
an open-air installation designed by OMA
Tabi: Collectors Exhibition is on view at The Third Avenue Art Museum in Chengdu
stacked containers formed a navigable environment for the show
project info:
name: MaisonMargiela/Folders
archtitect: OMA / AMO | @oma.eu
brand: Maison Margiela | @maisonmargiela
lead architect: Rem Koolhaas (OMA)
locations: Shanghai — Yan Dang Road, Beijing — Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre, Chengdu — Third Avenue Art Museum, Shenzhen — Hairun Badminton Courts
dates: Shanghai: April 2nd–6th | Beijing: April 7th–12th | Chengdu: April 9th –13th | Shenzhen: April 11th –12th
production: La Mode En Images | @lamodeenimages
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