When H&M announced its latest designer collaboration with Maison Martin Margiela, we’ll admit we were a little surprised. Margiela is so avant-garde, so cult-y, and with little name recognition (OK, more than a little thanks to Kanye) we’d have figured them the last brand to do a collaboration with a mass retailer. But then again, H&M got Karl Lagerfeld to do a line for it in 2004, and then, somehow, the retailer convinced the most reclusive and enigmatic of designers, Rei Kawakubo, to do a Comme des Garcons collaboration in 2008. So maybe it’s not so surprising that Maison Martin Margiela is doing a mass collab–maybe it’s even obvious. It seems like every major designer has done a lower-priced collaboration with any number of mass retailers recently.

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