Friends say Marcia Berger described herself as a simple girl from Albuquerque. She left New Mexico to attend high school in La Jolla (San Diego County), majored in English at UCLA, spent some time in San Francisco, then waitressed for a spell at the Palomino, the country rock bar in West Hollywood.
When she died of a heart attack in January 2008 at 61, she was working as a college textbook editor to support her writing and living in the Los Angeles enclave of Koreatown, where she rented an apartment.
It was packed with the clothes she started collecting in the mid-1980s, when Japanese designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo caught her eye. As if their designs weren’t intellectual enough, a few years later she began buying pieces from Maison Martin Margiela.
For the next 20 years, Berger bought some of the rarest and most rarefied pieces the house, known as much for its limited production as its vast influence, produced.
“Even now, it’s not a giant, enormous company for all the ideas and new things he’s produced,” says Chris Ospital, co-owner of San Francisco’s avant-fashion MAC (Modern Appealing Clothing) boutique.
Berger cultivated a collector’s global network, although she never met Margiela himself. She tracked down more than 1,000 pieces, competing with fashion insiders, museums and designers eager to own Margiela’s work. She found, and bought, iconic items such as a top assembled from vintage kid gloves, jewelry crafted from hair, and handbags made from Margiela’s trademark white muslin. She bought boots and shoes, including his split-toe styles that resemble traditional Japanese tabi.
A selection of Berger’s collection is now available online in a sale mounted by 1stDibs.com. Curated by Mark Haddaway and Katy Rodriguez, vintage fashion experts who own Resurrection, the sale started on Feb. 13 and continues through March 31.
That it comes soon after Margiela announced his retirement gives the event added import because he will no longer be creating.
Collecting clothing was “her way of expressing herself, her artistic point of view,” says Janelle Thibodaux, who discovered Berger’s body after not hearing for several days from the customer who had become a friend. Thibodaux manages the Margiela collection at the Laura Urbinati boutique in Los Angeles. “She collected other designers, but Margiela was her passion.”
So much for Berger’s “I’m just a simple girl from Albuquerque” line. “Buying this kind of fashion, spending this kind of money, simple girls did not do this,” says Thibodaux.
Berger knew she wanted the best, most important Margiela pieces, says Thibodaux. “She didn’t want to give (the collection) away to a museum. … She felt that she’d one day be able to sell (the collection) and make a lot of money.”
Instead, Nancy Higgins, Berger’s childhood friend - they were cheerleaders together - and executor inherited Berger’s fashions. “Her bequest to me was her collection,” says Higgins, an Albuquerque attorney who lived in Marin Country from 1995 to 2001. “I was ignorant of all these people she thought were geniuses.”
Higgins, who describes her friend as “physically beautiful and probably brilliant in terms of her intellect,” says she never really understood why Berger collected fashion. Over the years, she had listened to Berger’s tales of her Margiela hunts, but “I’d laugh, and I’d say, ‘That’s great!’ … She had her love of it. I looked at (the clothes) and said, ‘Hmm.’ ”
Berger’s will also earmarked money to endow a women’s scholarship fund at UCLA as well as set up the nonprofit, Marcia Berger Educational Foundation for the same purpose, Higgins said. “Her intent and interest was to provide for those most in need.”
Thibodaux put Higgins in touch with the Resurrection team, which then arranged sales of Berger’s collections of designers before mounting the Margiela project online. Higgins says she had no idea how much the Margiela collection is worth: “It’s an incredible gift to me. I didn’t do anything; I was just her friend.”
By Beth Hughes
The San Francisco Chronicle
