With its sparse walls, exposed pipes, and undressed mannequins, Maison Martin Margiela looks more like ... with a smattering of shoes and a tiny jewelry case off to the side with unusual creations ...

making it the largest single auction of Margiela ever held. Key pieces hailed from seminal collections such as Maison Martin Margiela's spring 1990 show, and were estimated to fetch between 1,200 ...

One of its effects was to focus attention on the clothes themselves, created by a team and credited to Maison Martin Margiela, aka MMM. And what intriguing clothes they were: Recall, for instance ...