Glenn Martens has a brilliant, no-holds-barred debut at Maison Margiela.
The last time Maison Margiela held an “artisanal” show, the brand’s version of couture, it shook the fashion world. That was back in January 2024. John Galliano was creative director, and his theatrical vision of smoke-filled cafes and nighttime assignations had attendees swooning in delight and shrieking genius.
So it was pretty audacious, all things considered, for Glenn Martens, the new designer of the brand, to decide that his first coed show — and the first Margiela show of any kind since Mr. Galliano’s — should also be couture.
Good thing it offered some genius of its own.
An exhilarating, multidimensional, occasionally misguided explosion of ideas, it was the most propulsive show of the week; a scream of originality amid collections and designer debuts that have largely offered well-calibrated wearability. It was extreme in its imagination and technique (sometimes too much so), but never namby-pamby. It’s what fashion needs.
Even if it did not begin well.
Held in the same underground warren of concrete rooms where Martin Margiela, the founder, had staged his last show in 2008, it began, in fact, with two women in transparent plastic dresses. Their hands were trapped at the waist beneath their pencil skirts, their faces encased in plastic masks.
Masks were a Margiela signature — he thought they served to focus attention on the clothes — but here the models looked as though they were suffocating. It was painful to see, and seemed even more painful to wear, whether or not it was conscious commentary on the state of women in the world.
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