Hard and soft: Glenn Martens keeps it simple at Maison Margiela
For Spring-Summer 2027, Glenn Martens brought Maison Margiela back to Paris with a collection that filtered hard and soft contrast into the house codes. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
It’s been two weeks since OTB, which owns both Maison Margiela and Diesel, announced Glenn Martens’ departure from the latter. After six years at the helm of the Italian brand, the move enables the designer to focus entirely on the haute couture house he took over from John Galliano a year and a half ago. After an excursion to Shanghai last season, Martens returned Maison Margiela to Paris on Tuesday evening to kick off this new chapter. Hole’s Violet blasted through the rooms of Elysée Montmartre – “Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to” – decorated with walls of decayed flowers inserted into visible floral foam, which the show notes declared were a tribute to Raf Simons’ first couture show for Dior.
The collection served as a demonstration of how Martens has absorbed the house vocabulary since his arrival there a year and half ago. Gone were the Matthieu Blazy-era masks he has been using since his arrival. In their place were faces made tonal with all-over foundation as a kind of expression of anonymity or perhaps a blank canvas. Some models were done up with theatrical make-up like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The idea was “hard and soft”, a contrast that pervaded each of Martens’ looks. Trench coats were constructed with hardened panels, draped dressed were inset with breastplates and wrap skirts were stiffened. Laminated florals like those of waxy tablecloths were contrasted by the softness of lining or tight, Lycra-like materials.
Like his work at Diesel, Martens’ approach to the sophisticated subversion of the Maison’s founder Martin Margiela is decidedly down to earth and straightforward: a slightly twisted take on everyday clothing infused with the odd Renaissance element and a fair amount of trashy rawness.
ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN
Like his work at Diesel, Martens’ approach to the sophisticated subversion of the Maison’s founder Martin Margiela is decidedly down to earth and straightforward: a slightly twisted take on everyday clothing infused with the odd Renaissance element and a fair amount of trashy rawness. Take, for instance, this collection’s interpretation of the mesh dresses from 1991, a sportier, gothier and almost cruder iteration on the original form. It made for a collection that stuck to the house vocabulary while dissolving into Martens’ harder, more graphic language.
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