After Wang Zongfu, curator of the Beijing exhibition, and Margiela had communicated by email for more than a year, the pair finally met in a Paris cafe this year.

"I didn't know what he looked like, and the famous portrait of him was out of date, but that day I walked straight to the man who I thought might be him, with an inexplicable confidence and intuition, and said hello," Wang says.

Margiela was casually dressed, wearing a plaid buttoned shirt, loose jeans, glasses clipped to his breast pocket, and a sample of the bracelet he had designed specifically for the exhibition in Beijing, Wang recalls. Margiela recognized the fabric of the souvenir T-shirt for the exhibition in his hand by twisting it.

The exhibition is jointly presented by the museum and the Fondation d'Entreprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris, which hosted Margiela's first solo exhibition in the world last year.