Glenn Martens’ Maison Margiela RTW Debut
Anders Christian Madsen reviews Glenn Martens’ ready-to-wear debut collection for Maison Margiela, for Spring/Summer 2026.
A live orchestra of children played their inspired versions of the great composers for Glenn Martens’ ready-to-wear debut for Maison Margiela on Saturday afternoon at Centquatre-Paris. Perhaps it was the designer’s way of illustrating how he felt following in the footsteps not only of Martin Margiela, but of Matthieu Blazy and John Galliano, who each evolved and innovated the house’s codes with visionary impact. Met with favourable reviews, his haute couture collection in July catered to a wistfulness for the “Martin” of “Margiela”: the atmosphere, codes, and pieces created by the founder, which continue to inspire a cult-like admiration in the industry and beyond.
It’s bred by our time’s nostalgic reverence for anything archival, expressed in nerdy nagging about authenticity on social media and celebrities wearing old dresses on red carpets. Martens is embracing that mood. His first ready-to-wear collection for Maison Margiela sampled the tropes of the founder’s era – from 1988 to 2009 – and remixed them in a medley of Martin-ness: lapel-less leather coats and blazers, apron-like structures and skirts, reconstructed denim pieces, monastic dress silhouettes, taped-up crinkled slip dresses, translucent layers of fabric, collaged floral dresses, de- and reconstructed eveningwear, and garments encased in plastic and tape. The collection refeatured the Tabi Claw boots from July’s couture proposal and brought back some of the house’s more subversive trainers.
MAISON MARGIELA
On a broad level, the collection translated the codes of Martin Margiela in an easy, simplified way that will open the house’s enigmatic doors to a new type of customer now less hesitant to approach its intellectual aura. True to the hand of Martens, there was a slightly menacing, somewhat dystopian feeling to the proceedings, powered not least by the fetish-y mouth retractors worn in every look. Their construction evoked the four stitches of Maison Margiela’s branding around the forced-open lips of the models, a gesture the house related to the uniformity the founder created through face coverings and his overall philosophy of anonymity. In the Margiela-ness of it all, the gags felt like a wink to the following Martens has garnered at Diesel, where he still serves as creative director.
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