Concept store · re-hung every six weeks · Antwerp
MARGIN is a shop that behaves like an exhibition — forty pieces, one argument, six weeks, then the walls go bare and it starts again. Currently hanging: fourteen designers on the discipline and collapse of the stripe.
The idea
Most stores accumulate. MARGIN edits. Every six weeks the entire floor is rehung around one idea — a colour, a cut, a contradiction — and forty pieces make the wall. What doesn't sell goes back to its maker with notes; nothing is discounted, ever, because the calendar is the discount.
Miss an edition and it's gone. The regulars have learned. The tourists learn fast.
Edition 014
Forty pieces, fourteen designers, hung until the 28th. A sample of the argument:
The system
Buy it now or remember it forever.
The archive
Every edition closes with a riso-printed lookbook: the forty pieces, the argument in 300 words, and the sales wall photographed bare on the last night. The full set lives on a shelf by the till and is not for sale, which everyone asks and one person once tested.
Edition 015 — 'SEAM / VISIBLE' — hangs from the 3rd. The hanging list hears first.
Overheard
I hesitated on a coat in Edition 011. I still think about that coat. I no longer hesitate. This store has rewired me and I'm honestly grateful.
Came in asking if things go on sale at the end. The assistant said 'the end is the sale' and I stood there while it rearranged my whole retail worldview.
Fourteen designers I'd never heard of, hung better than most museums I've paid for. Bought socks and a worldview.
The hanging list
Visit
Kloosterstraat, the front that looks shut. It isn't. Push.