Paris Couture Week 2025: Glenn Martens makes his Maison Margiela debut with hauntingly sculptural Fall line
Hauntingly beautiful, Glenn Martens' debut as Maison Margiela's Creative Director with the Fall line, sets the standard outrageously high
Glenn Martens just debuted for Maison Margiela and from the looks of the French luxury house's Paris Couture Week showcase, we're most likely entering an era of high art.
Odd, provocative, sculptural and dripping with inspiration, the most striking thing about Glenn's debut artisanal Fall line wasn't its very evident ability to stop traffic and loop conversation — but instead, it's potential to set high art in motion. A certain sense of nakedness trailed every model that walked on ramp, while barely revealing any hint of skin (save for those peaks of bright pink dip dyed nails). It was a hauntingly masked depersonalisation of the body, which in turn became the vessel to carry the personification of architecture.
Gothic and medieval architecture inspired Glenn's stunning debut with 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings serving as the textural blueprints. Not one look that walked down the Le Centquatre was a silhouette — they were all elaborate installations.
The rhinestone-encrusted, foiled or smocked full masks were a constant as the lineup oscillated between marble prints imitating what time would do to cracked soil, slightly more luxurious crushed silk impressions encased in evening silhouettes, Grecian-esque provocateurs and a gracefully constructed psychedelia of whimsical florals.
The real cincher? Most of what went into curating the artisanal line is reportedly thrifted, most of the core cuts and textures being sourced from a very gate-kept Guérissol, a chain of six stores around Paris with pieces usually selling for as less as 5 euros.
For anyone stunned, Glenn had shared a while back that "the preciousness of showing you are extremely rich just doesn't fit into the Margiela language. So we're not going to do a $75,000 dress, all hand-embroidered or whatever, because that wouldn't fit in here. But we are going to find a different form of opulence and richness, and hopefully somebody a little bit more cheeky will engage with it".
Glenn's debut then, is the perfect encapsulation of the fact that luxury being interpreted as a richness of inspiration and vision, as opposed to just plain old richness, is likely to yield more breathtaking results than anticipated.
