On the night of April 1, after Maison Margiela’s FW26 show cleared out of a shipyard on the outskirts of Shanghai, 150 guests sat down to dinner inside a 弄堂 (alley), the lane that working-class Shanghai lived along before the blocks started coming down. 许光汉, Blue Pongtiwat and Nicky Hilton Rothschild had all been in the audience earlier that evening.
The show had already travelled: the first Margiela runway outside Paris since the house was established in 1988, the first time Glenn Martens put Artisanal and ready-to-wear on a single lineup, a beeswax coat that crackled when it moved, a porcelain-shard gown, 70-odd masked looks staged among blue and rust-red shipping containers. What happened after the lights went down at the shipyard went unreported.
Inside the Maison Margiela FW26 post-show dinner venu
Shanghai has been demolishing its alleys for decades. This one is a permanent reconstruction called 重逢·记忆中的90年代上海 (Reunion: Shanghai as remembered in the nineties), run by 城市集市 (City Market), open to the public since July 2021 on the second basement level of North Bund Raffles City.
City Market goes back each time a block comes down and takes what’s left, so most of what’s in the room came off real demolition sites: the red-framed windows, the neon shopfront characters, the bicycle against the wall, the laundry strung overhead, the 弄堂面馆 (alley noodle shop) sign burning at the far end. They don’t stop at architecture, and the room dates itself precisely, Shenhua at Hongkou and the East Asian Games.
Guests ate at a single table running the length of the alley, set with white linen and crystal stemware, calla lilies in individual glass vases, chopsticks alongside forks, a printed Maison Margiela menu card at every place. Above them hung a banner that was already there before the dinner was booked: 上海女人有主张 搞得定 摆得平 输得起 (Shanghai women have convictions. Get things done. Hold their ground. Know how to lose.)
Bastard Shanghai: the restaurant behind the dinner
Chef Michael Janczewski and Jiro H of Bastard, in collaboration with catering company A-STAR, handled the food. They opened Bastard during the Shanghai lockdowns of 2022, 25 seats tucked at the end of a residential lane on Jiaozhou Road in Jing’an, inside a building that was once a youth hostel. Mod-Chinese small plates, natural wine, the kind of address that requires knowing where you’re going. Since opening they’ve taken the restaurant to London and Paris on pop-ups and earned a place in Apartamento. For the Margiela dinner they scaled to 150 guests: 15 chefs, 70 front of house, two weeks of preparation.
Jiro wrote afterwards that at four in the afternoon they still hadn’t worked out how to power the steamer for the third course, fish for 150 people with no backup, until an electrician from Minhang talked the sound crew into sharing power.
Dinner opened with a hairy crab spring roll with yellow wine sabayon and aged vinegar, paired with Domaine de Saint Pierre Château Renard 2020 from Jura. Then bluefin tuna tartare cheung fun with smoked soy vinaigrette, paired with Domaine du Closel Savennières AOP Chenin Blanc from Anjou. Steamed coral trout with fermented white asparagus and spring vegetables took the same Chenin Blanc alongside. To close, riz de Koji au lait with truffle and caramelised white chocolate, paired with Pagoda Xue Jian, a Shaoxing yellow wine blended across three vintages, 2007, 2011 and 2012. French natural wine for the first three courses, then China for the last.
Glenn Martens, discarded things, and a rebuilt Shanghai lane
Martens spent the months before FW26 talking about the beauty of discarded things, the flea market after closing, the object that outlasted its context. The collection came out of porcelain dolls from the 1870s he found in Paris second-hand shops. The room his guests ate in that night came out of the same instinct. The alley and the cracked porcelain gown draw from the same place: something the city was losing, held long enough to become something else.
Catering: A-STAR Catering Service. Kitchen: Bastard Shanghai (@bastardshanghai). Production: MOBIUSHUB.