RUNWAY
Welcome to Glenn Martens’s Maison Margiela — ‘It’s Going to Be Quite Loud’
By Luke Leitch
July 8, 2025
Fashion stories rarely begin at Burger King. Yet that is where Glenn Martens happened to be at the precise moment in late January when he became creative director of Maison Margiela. As so often when in full flow, Martens tells the tale through gusts of laughter. “I’ve bought this place in Normandy, in the countryside. And I’d been there for four days. There was no electricity, and no heating, and so I’d been staying warm with the fire in the chimney and not showered once. On Monday night I was driving back to Paris, covered in soot with straw in my hair. My lawyer called at 8 pm and said, ‘Stop right now!’ So we pulled over into a Burger King, and that’s where I signed the contract for Margiela. And the next morning at 10 am I arrived at the studio: ‘Hello everybody!’”
Tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm Paris time, Martens, 42, will show his first-ever collection for the 1988-founded house. It is an ‘Artisanal’ collection: part of the hand-worked, atelier-made line that Martin Margiela introduced in 1989, and which became part of the Paris haute couture calendar in 2006.
“It’s going to be quite loud,” observes Martens. “Artisanal has always been a fundamental expression of Margiela, and this first collection is the moment for me to establish a tone of voice, and to reconnect with the founding values of Margiela through my interpretation of them.”
The line between teaser and spoiler is a fine one, and to cross it here is tempting. So suffice it to say that what Martens shows me in the atelier is as explosive as it is “loud,” thanks to the designed proximity of multiple material and aesthetic elements—rawness and richness, brutalism and opulence, control and extravagance, moody gloom and joyful kaboom—within a controlled environment defined by powerfully gestural silhouettes.
Observes Martens: “I’m not saying everything is how I first designed it, but that’s the process: It’s become better than my drawings.” There are specific points of connection both to the philosophy of giving everyday objects a second life through imaginative re-conception that was central to the work of Martin Margiela, and to the Belgian-ness that Margiela and Martens share. And there are masks.
“We are fitting these today,” says Martens of one group of them. “Then they will go to a car mechanic we are working with who will solder them together.” Martin Margiela’s first show, for spring/summer 1989, included masked looks, as did many that followed. It was a device designed to divert attention to the garments rather than the models wearing them, and which also reflected Margiela’s not anonymous but determinedly reclusive stance.
This speaks to what Martens identifies as a prime value of the house he now leads. He says: “The integrity of the garment is where everything starts: the garment should speak for itself. So that is why Martin would mask his models. And I think that’s interesting and contradictory today, where in 2025 the success of runways is often at least partially based on engagement with the models on social media. What is nice for me, at least for the moment, is I really try to talk about garments: clothes come first. And hopefully the clothes themselves will get the hits on social media: hopefully!”
They should also, Martens hopes, impact the synapses of desire for a new constituency of couture clients, an audience he first considered when guest designing Jean Paul Gaultier couture in 2022. “That gave me a very powerful workshop into understanding the needs and wants of a couture client… but the preciousness of showing you are extremely rich just doesn’t fit into the Margiela language. So we’re not going to do a $75,000 dress, all hand-embroidered or whatever, because that wouldn’t fit in here. But we are going to find a different form of opulence and richness, and hopefully somebody a little bit more cheeky will engage with it.”
Martens and his new colleagues have spent some time profiling the women they are designing for in order to fashion a kind of audience archetype. “She doesn’t care,” he says of this imagined spirit of the house: “She might be wearing the most beautiful chiffon dress or leather coat, but she will walk outside in the rain to get to her dinner because it takes too long to take a taxi. She will have no problem going to an art opening and drinking wine from a plastic cup. She rolls her own cigarette… The beauty and the sexiness is definitely based on attitudes.”
Beyond attitude, figuring out the scope and function of the codes that will shape his clothes for Maison Margiela has been a creatively complex equation for Martens to formulate. The first and most fundamental part of it relates to the work of Martin Margiela himself. Because as Martens puts it: “The reason behind the success of houses is their founding values and their codes, so that is what you need to respect as a new creative director. What’s really beautiful is to then possess them and bring them into the world in a new way.”
Part of the specific challenge with Maison Margiela, he continues, is just how influential the founder’s thinking became across all fashion. “I myself am one of those children of the Margiela generation. And I think Martin is more than a designer, he is a school that has changed a lot of people’s thinking… The Japanese were a bit before, but I think in Europe it was Martin who made this change, this thought that garments don’t have to follow a classic structure. It was trying to find a different way of looking at beauty, of looking at construction and looking at fashion at large. And this has been a design ethos for so many designers since, some of them more directly and some of them less so. I have always been someone, I think quite clearly, who has always followed that way of thinking.”
Which leads to questions of originality, ownership, and identity. Martens laughs again as he recounts the sometimes creatively confronting nature of his deep dive into the Margielian world. “When I arrived here I asked my stylist to bring out all of Martin’s archive pieces. Because I had always only ever seen them in books. And finally seeing the real items, I was so disappointed in myself. I was like: ‘My God, I just copied everything before when I was at Y/Project!’”
“I love this house for its founding DNA, but definitely a lot of that DNA has been fully plundered; literally plundered, this is the best word for it. Reclaiming some of these elements, trying to reclaim them with elegance, and finding my own way to work through them is what I want to do.”
If Martens’s own 13-year output at that Parisian indie label was unconsciously saturated by Margiela’s influence, there are some who have taken a far more premeditated approach to incorporating his new house’s creative canon. He says: “Margiela has been a source to so many designers and brands, some more literally than others. I love this house for its founding DNA, but definitely a lot of that DNA has been fully plundered: literally plundered, this is the best word for it… Reclaiming some of these elements, and trying to reclaim them with elegance, and finding my own way to work through them is what I want to do.”
Another factor for Martens to calculate is the enormous contribution to the house from John Galliano, who served as the creative director from October 2014 to December 11, 2024. Martens says: “I love everything he has done here… John is a genius in couture. He created his own fantastic world, and the product was very much linked to it. I could never be John: only one reason for that is because I am not such a good storyteller.” Galliano arrived at Margiela three years after the end of his 13-year stint at Christian Dior, where he had created some of the most opulent and narratively expressive couture shows fashion has ever seen. His unique articulation of that apex house of mainstream French luxury was duly refracted through his work at Maison Margiela.
This, Martens implies, offers him a distinct route forward as he plots his path ahead. He says: “I think in the days of Martin this world was much more niche. The luxury was more about the exclusivity of it through an independent way of thinking. Now it is also about the craftsmanship and the tailoring: John brought that in and we need to continue building it, because it is part of the development of this house.”
Separately, however, he adds: “I am very much a person of the streets. And I do think that the reality of the everyday street was also a starting point for Martin. And that’s something that I want to reconnect with again.”
One key to unlocking that point of connection, Martens feels, is the spiritual kinship of Belgian-ness he shares with the founder. He says: “There is something, I think, that is truly Belgian. Because Belgium is really not the most beautiful country in the world… just very rainy, very industrial, very no-nature: not beautiful… so I think we are also obliged to find beauty in the unexpected—that’s what Belgians do.”
He continues: “So if it’s Dries Van Noten trying to put the most disgusting colors next to each other and suddenly finding something beautiful, or it’s Martin taking a plastic bag and making it luxury, I think that’s a Belgian attitude. And this is something that I would love to bring back to the house.”
Martens discloses that on that very first day he reported to Maison Margiela, January 28, this couture collection was already fully designed. He says: “I came in with all of it, completely drawn down to the details; all the colors, all the mood boards, everything was there. So they had only to develop it.” Part of this, he adds, was thanks to his own nature: “I have the complex of being a good boy, the first in class, always.” Additionally he was anticipating the desire of Renzo Rosso, for whose Only The Brave Group Martens had already been working as the creative director of Diesel since 2020. “I knew Renzo would want me to make this collection. So I needed to come prepared.”
This is why Martens started designing while discussions for him to succeed Galliano had not yet been finalized at that fateful Burger King pitstop. The weekend before Christmas, he went to Venice and started formulating his ideas while tipsy in his hotel restaurant. “I had lots of the books, and began putting Post-It notes on elements to identify fundamentals that were less exploited.” Then in a two-week period over Christmas, he set about imagining and drawing this collection while staying at his brother’s house in Bruges, the town where they were born and raised. Martens had returned home because their grandfather, who last year was proud to receive a letter from King Philippe of Belgium on his 100th birthday, had just passed away.
Martens might be a harsh critic of Belgium’s place in the beauty stakes, but there is no doubt that Bruges is one of the most beautiful towns in Europe. And there are aspects of his home town that chime directly with his description of Maison Margiela itself. “I think the history of Margiela is very melancholic and poetic. Even though there’s also irreverence, always. But I always felt it was like bathing in the shadows of Gothic cathedrals.”
Any new boss’s first few weeks in a job can be potentially tense, both for the new recruit and the existing staff that he or she has been hired to direct. However not long after delivering this fully designed couture collection, Martens brought in a “secret weapon” with him to the Maison Margiela atelier: a beautifully cute and characterful puppy named Murphy. On our second chat, a Zoom, Murphy is lifted to the screen and promptly licks the new creative director of Maison Margiela on the nose. “Basically everybody instantly has fallen in love with him. I got him about a month after starting here, and he comes with me pretty much everywhere—he’s been a hit!”
As has become a bit of a habit during our meetings in Milan for Diesel, and before that sometimes in Paris for Y/Project, Martens and I ended our appointment with an illicit window-side smoke. Speaking of Diesel, which he is continuing to creative direct, the designer seemed confident that he can effectively divide both his mind and time between the demands of the Milan based denim-juggernaut and his new storied Parisian aerie of counter-intuitive high design.
“Diesel is Diesel, you know? It’s Gen Z, street, rave, pop... I’m not there anymore, I’m drinking my tea in the garden with my dog. But I love the values of Diesel, and taking my angle on them, and diving into it and owning it. That doesn’t mean it has to be exactly me, and that’s ok: in fact I think that’s the job of a creative director at any brand that is not his or her name.” The fact that Martens presented many excellent Y/Project shows during his crucial first three years at Diesel is further evidence of his capacity to handle this new two-jobs scenario.
Now, though, his immediate focus is on Maison Margiela. Leaning on the windowsill in his house blouse blanche, Martens looked over the sun-dappled Place des États-Unis and observed: “This is a dream place. It’s a dream place to come home to. And obviously it also comes with a lot of stress, specifically because I don’t want to f*ck this up, and the expectations are high. So based on that I want to own my success or my failure. And we will see!”
Glenn Martens will make his Maison Margiela Artisanal debut on Wednesday, July 9.
