What happens when the person behind the image begins to disappear? Maison Margiela turns identity, performance and the fear of losing yourself into a psychological thriller.
Who are you when the image staring back at you starts to feel like somebody else? In Maison Margiela’s ‘Anonymity’, Rebecca Hall plays an actress preparing for a role who repeatedly encounters her own masked double. Directed and photographed by Thibaut Grevet, the Fall Winter 2026 campaign takes the form of a trailer for a fictional psychological thriller, using the conventions of cinema to push one of the house’s defining ideas into darker territory.
Hall moves through a world in which reality becomes increasingly unstable. A television appears to bleed, strange substances emerge from her mouth and ghostly figures inhabit domestic spaces. Behind the horror imagery lies a familiar tension: the gap between the person we experience ourselves to be and the version of us that exists in the eyes of others. For Hall, that tension also echoes the contradictions of public life and the simultaneous desire to be seen and to disappear.
The masked double makes that conflict literal while reconnecting it with the history of the house. From Martin Margiela obscuring models’ faces in 1988 to decades of masks, collective authorship and the founder’s own withdrawal from public visibility, anonymity became one of Margiela’s most recognisable signatures. Earlier this year, the exhibition ‘Anonymity: Our History of Masks’ in Beijing returned to that archive, tracing concealment as a creative language.
In ‘Anonymity’, the mask becomes psychological. The question moves from who is hidden underneath it to how certain we can ever be that the self we recognise is the real one. Styled by Ursina Gysi, with hair by Tom Wright, makeup by Lucia Pica and music composed by Senjan Jansen, the campaign turns fashion’s obsession with image back onto itself.
—
Follow us on Instagram @veinmagazine
