In common with so many designers, Glenn Martens showed a clearly commercial proposition this season. Fair enough: he’s had three shows for Maison Margiela so far, two of them rivetingly and outrageously dramatic. Now that we fully know what he’s capable of, he was putting forward a more basic analysis of what the DNA of the house boils down to. “Martin Margiela was about the ‘anti’ when he began in the late 1980s, so we really worked with that,” he said. “The hard and the soft. This kind of contradiction in fabric.”
So: here were Margiela house archetypes, but messed up only to a degree or two. “I’m trying to really figure out how can we bring a strong concept in, and be really consistent in the concept in every garment, but without being also scary,” said Martens. Part of the approachability included florals he identified as ’60s-era brocades, lending themselves to column skirts, tied on with typical Margiela cotton tape ribbon. The classic tailoring of the house was treated to a kind of concertina effect in front, lapels folded inward on a knife-edge fold, but also possible to be folded back out and worn in a ‘normal’ manner.
Trenches, grey T-shirts and draped jersey dresses had ‘hard’ balcony-like inserts of interfacing in front. For many years, Margiela was a secret resource for well-cut ‘normal’ clothes that only insiders really knew about. That kind of secret, subtly concise chic was visible again in his show: a white overcoat with a stiff front, an open checked shirt, also stiffened, worn over high-waisted tailored ski pants.
In this day and age though, Martens says “You have to speak to a much broader clientele than Martin used to have. We have to speak to the world, so it’s a bit difficult to go as hard on concepts.”
For another kind of customer, who might have been hooked in by the John Galliano years at Margiela, there was a continuation of his method of excavating garment linings and displacing them. Martens took his own angle on it by laminating a red lace slip with vinyl and inserting it within a pink satin coat, to beautiful effect.
He couldn’t quite hold himself back from doing some elaborated evening dresses, either. One had what looked like a whole set of family silver crushed into a kind of breast-plate. The other was a sculptural draped gown, complete with swags and a flowing cape, vaguely reminiscent of a baroque monument. At heart, Martens said with a laugh, he’s never going to be an old-school minimalist. When it comes to him, he said, “I’m the guy who’s in churches all day long. Opulence—that’s me.”
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