Last night in Paris, Glenn Martens didn’t reference Martin Margiela — he resurrected him. In his Artisanal debut for Maison Margiela, Martens didn’t chase authorship. Instead, he committed a radical act of alignment: subsuming ego in favor of ethos, letting memory and process speak louder than self. On the same runway where Margiela once bowed out, Martens built a cathedral of craft.
The masks said it all. Just as they did in Margiela’s 1989 debut, they erased identity to spotlight creation — a house code as conceptual as it is literal. Here, garments are ghosts, not products. Aprons born from jeans. Skirts spliced from biker jackets. Trompe-l’œil florals echoing Flemish tapestries. Everything handmade, everything haunted by past lives. It wasn’t sustainability. It was resurrection.
Martens summoned Belgian medievalism and baroque romanticism, sculpting heart-shaped brocade skirts and mythic silhouettes like Gustave Moreau paintings in motion. Even with molded plastics and Plexiglas, the collection read like antique relics: tragic, sacred, and deeply felt.
Yes, Galliano’s ghost passed through — in the floral flourishes and volume-heavy drama — but Martens filtered it through something rawer, even mystic. His anatomical corsets, slicing under ribcages and gripping over pelvises, traced not bodies, but sacred geometry.
Each piece whispered its own backstory — a jacket with the weight of a curtain, a dress with the steel of armor. The result wasn’t about understanding, but absorbing. Like memory, like myth.
Martens didn’t just inherit a legacy — he cracked it open, poured himself in, and let it bleed. The message is clear: at Maison Margiela, design is still a vessel for ideas, not algorithms. And some houses still believe in ghosts.