Moulds growing on fashion

In 1997 Belgium fashion designer Martin Margiela produced his first solo exhibition, 9/4/1615 at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum of Rotterdam.
In collaboration with a microbiologist, Margiela treated his clothes with bacterias and moulds.
Caroline Evans in her book Fashion at the edge: spectacle, modernity and deathliness associate the traces of moulds in Margiela's work to the figure of the ragpicker who fascinated Baudelaire and Benjamin hundred years before. And even more, to the more actual concept of consumerism and consumption: "Ingrid Loschek has observed that, when he destroyed his clothes with mould and bacteria, Mergiela compared the natural cycle of creation and decay to the consumer cycle of buying and discarding."