She spent the workweek in the French capital, where Margiela was based, doing everything from raising funds to advising him in fittings. “If I said a woman might not like this or that, he listened,” she says. “He took it very seriously.” She returned to Belgium each weekend, to maintain her businesses in order to support the new venture and to take care of her two children, Sophie and Frank, whose father she’d separated from some time before. “I was working very, very, very hard,” she says. “With little money I would drive to Paris, and there were times when I was worried about filling the petrol tank.”

“For me everything seemed normal,” her daughter Sophie says. “Jenny was quite absent and she left us to find things out for ourselves. She didn’t hold our hands. She would come back at the weekend to cook and fill the fridge. It was when Post-it notes came out. She loved them. The house was always full of instructions: Clean the bathtub after you take a shower, do this, do that, like this, like that.” Sophie would go on to work with her mother at Margiela. “Even before they started the company, Jenny and Martin were always together,” she says. “It really was like two souls that found each other in their extreme passions.”

Meirens and Margiela were, in many ways, perfectly complementary. “Jenny brought a lot of things to the table,” Simons says. “She’s also a business mind, you know, a woman who really, really wanted to create a business. The things that were coming out of Martin at the time were quite extreme. To connect the idea of that with, ‘O.K., let’s start a company,’ makes Jenny quite a pioneer. It was a very different time from now. It was not meant to be immediately about doing big business. It was really about Jenny and Martin knowing each other’s strengths. I think she was really sticking her neck out, taking responsibility, taking care of things that normally other people would take care of, so Martin could be totally free.”

By the time Meirens retired, in 2003, she had taken Margiela as far as she felt she was able to. “I was tired,” she says. The fashion pendulum had swung back toward branded product and trophy dressing, the very things she had always fought against. With the money she received from the sale of the company, she bought the seaside home in Puglia, a little dog she named Luna and the land for the house on a hill in Pajottenland, where she spends most of her time now.

