It is said that the eyes are the window to the soul, their depths revealing what lies deeper, perhaps even who. In 1989, at the house’s first runway show, Maison Margiela adorned its models in masks, obscuring their faces with sheer fabric, veils, and intentionally draped hair, drawing the audience’s eyes to the clothes rather than the person wearing them.

Maison Margiela released its Fall/Winter 2026 collection, alongside the trailer for a psychological thriller titled “Anonymity,” where the house revisits this distinction. The tone is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock: sounds and cinematic visuals that turn the stomach, twist the mind. Rebecca Hall stars as an actress preparing for a role, learning the fictional identity and losing her own.

There is leather and velvet, Edwardian silhouettes and second-skin pieces, the textures conveying an underlying sentience: soft, smooth, shimmery, flesh-like. One dress came from fusing a fringed silk scarf and skirt with a rectangle of floral-print chiffon; another was designed to evoke a double-layer pleated skirt caught above an open vent, blown over the wearer’s head. The masks themselves pulled from Maison Margiela’s Fall Winter 2026 show in Shanghai this April, when, like in Paris all those years ago, the models donned the now-signature masks.

For each figure that appears, a masked double does too, their faces obscured by vibrant, bejeweled fabric, identities withheld, warped, wavering. “Who are you?” asks the mysterious narrator, a question which follows the heroine everywhere, to the bottom of a long stairwell, the back of a cab, the eye of a rainstorm. “Do you think I’m alive?” she asks. And we’re no closer to an answer by the trailer’s end.