When Glenn Martens grew to become the artistic director of Paris-based fashion home Maison Margiela in January 2025, he anticipated by no means to present his face once more.
After all, the founding father of the brand, Martin Margiela, has not often been seen. Ever. Anonymity was key to the Belgian’s conception of constructing garments: moderately than large, company, and pop, he noticed fashion as small, artisanal, elusive. He coated fashions’ faces with masks and dressed his employees in white lab coats. In a well-known portrait from 2001, captured by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue, the complete employees pose cross-armed of their little white coats, with a chair left empty in the entrance row for the designer.
Those who took on the label after Margiela’s 2009 retirement have largely adopted go well with: Matthieu Blazy (the man now heading up fashion’s largest and splashiest title, Chanel) was not publicly acknowledged as Margiela’s artistic lead until journalist Suzy Menkes “outed” him in 2014. More lately, the controversial designer John Galliano used the home’s reticence as a refuge to rebuild his popularity after a series of antisemitic rants led to his ouster from French fashion monolith Dior in 2011.
But on a phenomenal Paris afternoon in March, Martens discovered himself reluctantly in entrance of the digicam, maskless however white-jacketed in his freshly all-white workplace — a nod to what the brand calls Bianchetto, or protecting garments, equipment and different surfaces in white in order that the put on and tear of life turns into a type of magnificence mark, moderately than a flaw.
He was going through the digicam to speak about the way you make a brand whose popularity was constructed on talking to a small viewers of clothes connoisseurs, really feel related throughout the world. And to begin, he’s decamping from fashion’s conventional capital, Paris, and taking Margiela to China, the place he’ll stage a large present on April 1, adopted by weeks of programming, free and open to the public, that can deliver the ethos of Margiela to the lots.
Maison Margiela Creative Director Glenn Martens on anonimity
“Look at me, I’m supposed to be there [off camera] — hidden,” he stated, smiling. “I always said to her” — right here, he gestured to Margiela’s chief advertising and marketing officer, sitting close by — “from the beginning, I’m not going to be the spokesperson of the brand. Look at me, one year later: BAM!”
Martens, a 42-year-old (and a Belgian, like Margiela himself), lives in a distinct period than even his well-known predecessors did only a few years in the past. There isn’t any avant-garde fashion to converse of, actually; each brand, from the logo-driven mega labels to artwork home darlings, has to put celebrities of their garments. Everyone has to cope with social media; even when your garments are designed for the few, you could have to know that everybody in the world can see them — and provide their suggestions, good or unhealthy. Martens is aware of this: at the denim brand Diesel, the place he’s additionally artistic director, and prior to that, at the defunct spunky-punky brand Y/Project, he has made an artwork out of constructing unusual concepts like twisted hems and corseted bodices really feel like the foundations for nice TikTok theses.
But Martens doesn’t need to make “one hit wonders,” as he calls social media catnip garments which have a flash of viral controversy, then disappear. He desires Margiela to stand for a much less apparent type of magnificence, refinement, and that almost all loaded phrase of all, luxurious.
Luxury is synonymous now with firstclass airport lounges and overpriced, hard-to-get purses. For Martens, it’s about pushing for one more mind-set and creating: “It’s all about repurposing, working in a different way, trying to find something alternative to the industry,” like a cloth present in a thrift store moderately than an unique French mill, or a costume scaled up to human dimension from a junk store porcelain doll. “But still working on it so intensively that actually the value becomes couture.”
So how do you make a cult brand really feel like a worldwide enterprise?
“Maison Margiela has always been quite introspective and introverted,” Martens stated. He desires the brand to discuss to “everybody, and not just [focus] on our niche way of thinking.”
Even for those who can’t afford Margiela, trying, studying and fascinated about it’s free — a principle embodied by the programming in China, which can happen in a number of cities throughout a number of weeks and which is, as Martens stated, “free and open to the public.” He’s displaying his Fall 2026 couture (or in the home’s parlance, Artisanal) and ready-to-wear garments in Shanghai on Wednesday, alongside a presentation in the center of the metropolis’s streets of Artisanal seems from throughout 20 years of Margiela historical past; an exhibition of a few of the world’s most rabid Tabi collectors in Chengdu; a possibility for the public to deliver a garment and provides it a DIY Bianchetto therapy in Shenzhen; and an exploration of the brand’s masks in Beijing. The enterprise was introduced in a brand new challenge referred to as Maison Margiela/folders, which makes all the imagery and analysis sometimes accessible solely by press and staff, accessible to all.
Why China? The nation, with its fashion-savvy shoppers, has grow to be a lodestar for the trade. Since 2019, Maison Margiela has opened 26 shops there, and Martens needed to higher join with the brand’s followers there. “When you go and meet people, you create stronger bonds. That’s why we decided to cancel the fashion weeks in Paris,” he stated. “It’s as relevant and important to be there.”
Martens discusses the course of and pondering of protecting an vintage costume with beeswax.
“We’re not really engaging in couture in a classic way,” Martens defined, standing in entrance of a recreation of an Edwardian costume impressed by the ensembles worn by that period’s porcelain dolls. He and his group made the clothes proportionate to a contemporary (non-doll) wearer, after which, in a nod to China’s lengthy historical past of utilizing beeswax in candles and even cosmetics, dipped the complete garment in beeswax to give it a ghostly aura. It’s the type of piece that’s made to order, doubtless for only a shopper or two, and never couture in the conventional French sense, however terribly particular on Margiela’s personal phrases.
Get a remedy canine — and provides him a bit of uniform
Meet Glenn Marten’s Maison Margiela remedy canine, Murphy, as Martens clothes him in the home uniform of a white coat.
“When a creative director arrives in a new house, everybody gets very stressed because they have no idea what to expect,” stated Martens. “I really came into this company where it was a bit like on edge. And two weeks later, I got a dog” — Murphy — “which changed the whole atmosphere. Suddenly, everybody was the cutest — super happy. So he’s the official therapy dog of Maison Margiela.”
Why Kim Kardashian wears Maison Margiela from Creative Director Glenn Martens
Dressing celebrities is important to any fashion home’s survival; the proper well-known particular person in your outfit can imply tens of millions in income and boosted title recognition.
But for a label whose values run counter to the very notion of celeb — a barely photographed founder; a refusal to pay folks to put on its garments — Martens’s mandate is a tough one.
Instead, he sees Margiela as a second for celebrities to remodel themselves. He references Kim Kardashian, who was one in every of the first to put on his couture designs: “She’s of course a very public person; Margiela is very intimate,” he stated. But, “when she plays the game of wearing Margiela, she becomes Margiela.”
Does social media make fashion designers too threat averse?
Martens is extra fluent in the methods of social media than many designers working in the present day: he firmly believes in letting everybody in, but additionally is aware of that doing so dangers the criticism and, more and more, vitriol of on-line commenters. Mouthpieces resembling Margiela’s white four-stitch brand, which were affixed on models in Martens’s ready-to-wear show last fall, had been criticized for their dehumanizing effect.
“You’re gonna get slaps from different sides,” Martens stated. “What we have to do now — what I have to do now, and I hope my colleagues in other houses do now — is try to just stay cool and just focus on what they do and why they do it and not listen too much to all the buzz around it. Because I think that’s exactly what maybe happens today in fashion: things get a bit gray because we are trying to be safe, because we know that people scream loud.”
Martens plans to scream, if not louder, than with extra originality.