Glenn Martens’ thrilling Maison Margiela debut was a balancing act between past, present and future

His task was unenviable: to follow two of fashion’s most influential – and singular – designers, Martin Margiela and John Galliano, both much referenced, and in the fashion world, beloved. But on a warm evening in northern Paris last night (9 July 2025), far from the preen and polish of the A/W 2025 haute couture shows in the 1st arrondissement, Belgian designer Glenn Martens delivered a thrilling debut collection as creative director of Maison Margiela, which promised to ‘reclaim [the house’s DNA] with elegance’.

The show unfolded in the subterranean basement of Le Centquatre – a cultural centre in the city’s 19th arrondissement – where guests took their seats in various rooms amid a paper collage evoking what Martens said (somewhat cryptically) were ‘six different palatial interiors’. Crumpled, creased, and peeling from the walls like posters, they evoked Martin Margiela’s love of trompe l’oeil but also suggested a kind of faded grandeur – contemporary art installation and stately home all at once.

Glenn Martens’ Maison Margiela debut

Prior to the show, Martens had told Vogue Business that he felt as if Martin Margiela’s legacy had been referenced ad infinitum: ‘I love this house for its founding DNA, but definitely a lot of that DNA has been fully plundered; literally plundered,’ he said. It is something from which even he is not immune – his 11-year tenure at Y/Project was certainly influenced by his compatriot’s deconstructionist impulses.

And in the show, Martens did embrace one of Martin Margiela’s most enduring motifs: the mask, which first appeared in the Belgium designer’s S/S 1989 debut collection, held at a Parisian nightclub, and would become symbolic of his own desire for anonymity (Martin Margiela would not appear in public or undertake personal interviews, only replying to questions via fax as a collective ‘we’ of the Margiela atelier). Here, the masks came in battered metal, adorned with shattered crystals, or were constructed from feathery slices of sheer organza or appliquéd lace.

But there was new opulence to Martens’ vision. The designer said he had been looking towards the ‘medieval architecture and atmosphere of Flanders and the Netherlands’, which was conjured in rich layers of fabric manipulation. There were enormous undulating gowns in ripples of molten metallic organza, others that dramatically pinched the waist or appeared to be painted to evoke stone – ‘statuesque forms evoke the (saintly) figures of church façades’, read the collection notes – while a rich melange of jacquards, printed Renaissance motifs and embossed leather, recalling 16th-century Flemish wallpaper, were sliced and patchworked together. In the sense of collage, garments seemed to exist outside of time completely – a balancing act between past, present and future.

The collection was part of Maison Margiela’s Artisanal line, an elevated, couture-adjacent offering that is nonetheless largely constructed from found objects (it was inaugurated in 2006, long before the word ‘upcycling’ had even entered fashion parlance). Early collections were constructed from antique lace and worn-in blue jeans, or the silk of linings, and here Martens undertook a similar task – prior to the show, he said that much of the collection’s materials had come from garments sourced at Guérissol, a chain of Parisian thrift stores. Even the masks had been shaped from discarded metal boxes, while other looks were intricately pieced together from old costume jewellery. Here, carefully treated, they became something spectacular.

A reverence for the past has long been a part of the Maison Margiela project – from the house’s very beginnings, Martin Margiela treasured found objects, even as he took them apart to reimagine them anew. At Maison Margiela, several decades on, Martens faces a similar task of reinvention and reconstruction – a precarious balance of what to take and what to leave behind. With this confident debut, he seems to have already figured it out.

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