Whatever it was that we witnessed at the Glenn Martens Margiela debut, it was wrapped up in an an apparition of fearsome beauty. In basement chambers lined with layers of peeling paper, a collection of elababorately masked people evoked Gothic sculpture and strange, antiqued and patch-worked surfaces, sometimes almost as if they’d sprung from the walls themselves.
It takes some guts for a designer to follow both John Galliano and Martin Margiela, especially straight into presenting the Artisanal collection—the equivalent of haute couture at this house. It needed someone bold and fearless enough to seize that challenge, yet smart and skilled enough not to stumble obliviously over a storied past that many in fashion hold sacred. Martens proved himself to be that person: a designer who brings his own peculiarly Belgian sensibility to a label founded by a Belgian.
If we’ve been craving a frisson from fashion, now here it was, arriving in a strange, characterful form, a vision fraught with poetic imagery rising from dark corners of mediaeval history to give a new, cracked gloss to the upcycling and repurposing foundations of the house.
“I’m from Bruges, which has this whole gloomy, Gothic kind of gloominess,” Martens said in a preview. “Bruges has this austere vibe of Flanders, which, of course, very much connects with Martin. I’m different from that generation, but I think a lot of designers are—Martin changed the way we look at clothes. So it’s a massive honour and very humbling experience to be part of the house, and of course coming after John Galliano, the biggest couturier in history, is even more humbling.”
In a symbolic way, Martens made it about a house, starting from the richly decayed texture of 17th century Flemish embossed leather wallpaper, antique drapes, and the Dutch flower and ‘nature morte’ still lives of game that might have hung in homes of that time. “I am not a minimalist,” he laughed. In his mind, the decaying surfaces of the precious wallpaper made a connection with the painted and patch-worked techniques Margiela used in his first collection.
And then Martens was off, fashioning a collection that was one-third upcycled, making use of paper, photocopying, hand-painting, junk jewellery, and tin plates beaten into some of the masks. He began with clear plastic looks which referred, he said, to blown glass. Maybe also to Margiela’s dry-cleaning collection?
After, he took it in a wholly Martens way: two spectral figures conjured from Gothic church statuary, a disturbing confrontation, surely, with the deathly portents stalking our times. Then, the luminescent wonder of the figures swathed and swagged about in Martens’s metallised velvet drapes. There were recycled biker jackets—a Margiela staple—but covered over with paper patchworks of wallpaper print.
‘Chapters’ (as Martens called them) of more delicate things followed: tulle feathers, wings, or flowers blooming from the surfaces of prints, fluttering cut-outs of lace peeling from sheer dresses. But the total-chill moment came when his three draped jersey dresses, ghostly, caped, and body-veiling walked amongst us. Underneath these miraculously constructed sepulchral shrouds were corsets of a strange construction, jutting the hips and rising in a busk in the front. In that, it could be read that Martens made his acknowledgement to Galliano.
As a first outing, it was stupendous. Though it should not be forgotten that Martens has hardly sprung from nowhere. At 42, he’s in that bracket of designers who have had long experience from an early age (in his case, his own brand, Y/Project, Diesel, and a Gaultier couture season). These are the ones who have risen to the top at this moment to face off against each other for the fashion supremacy challenge of 2025. In Glenn Martens, Maison Margiela has surely found its ideal defender.
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