Maison Margiela × Glenn Martens
After Galliano’s dream, what will Margiela reconstruct?
Maison Margiela is a brand that has always been a little difficult to handle.
White tags.
Four stitches.
Tabi.
Clothes turned inside out.
Unraveled seams.
The idea of turning vintage and ready-to-wear into something else.
Those have now become codes that are quite famous even among fashion lovers.
But originally, Margiela was not a straightforward “icon brand.”
Rather, the brand kept a distance from the very idea of being turned into an icon.
Not revealing the designer’s face.
Interviews are handled as a team rather than as individuals.
Pulling the spotlight on the garments back from the maker’s stardom.
That was at the core of the maison Martin Margiela created.
Into that Margiela came John Galliano.
And now, Glenn Martens has come in.
This isn’t just a change of designers.
From anonymity, to theatricality.
From theatricality, back to structure.
I think this is the next chapter in a flow where Maison Margiela, as a brand, has changed the very way of seeing clothes from one era to the next.
After Galliano’s dream, what will Martens reconstruct?
Hidden there are quite big questions that contemporary luxury is grappling with.
What Martin Margiela broke was
Not clothes, but the “way fashion is presented”
MMaison Margiela was founded in 1988 by Martin Margiela and Jenny Meirens.
Martin Margiela’s garments are often described with the word “dismantling.” Of course, that isn’t wrong. Showing seam allowances. Exposing the lining to the outside. Reassembling vintage and ready-to-wear. Shifting sizes. Making the relationship between body and clothing slightly strange.
But I don’t think Margiela’s essence was simply about destroying clothes.
What he broke was the way fashion had come to assume it should be presented as something obvious.
That it’s new.
That it’s finished.
That everything is beautifully arranged.
That the designer is the star.
That the runway is a place for a glamorous dream.
Margiela doubted those things, little by little.
Does clothing really need to be brand-new?
Should the seams be hidden?
Should the designer’s name come before the clothes?
Who decides what “completion” is?
I think it’s in the way this question is posed that Margiela becomes more than a merely avant-garde brand—a maison that continues to be talked about even now.
Tabi, introduced in 1988, is a symbol of that. Split-toe boots inspired by Japanese tabi socks weren’t beautiful shoes so much as shoes that put a small, deliberate sense of discomfort at your feet. Even the staging that made you step on red paint and left footprints on the runway—rather than presenting clothes and shoes as “finished products”—treated them as things that leave traces.
For Margiela, clothes were less something to decorate and more something to make you think. That is the foundation of this house.
Galliano brought
“The power to dream” restored
2In 2014, when John Galliano was appointed Creative Director of Maison Margiela, many people were surprised.
If Martin Margiela were a person of anonymity, then Galliano is a person of theatricality. In his Dior days, he was a designer who transformed fashion shows into one vast dream—absorbing history, stories, the stage, makeup, hair, music, and silhouettes all at once.
That’s why the pairing of Margiela and Galliano seemed, at first glance, like a contradiction.
A designer with an intensely authorial sensibility enters a maison that hides faces.
A storyteller of magic enters an anonymous brand.
A surplus of emotion enters a place built for calm disassembly.
And yet, I think it was precisely this contradiction that made it so interesting.
Galliano didn’t simply make Margiela more glamorous. He expanded Margiela’s act of “breaking” into dreams and memories, the body, makeup, and theater.
In particular, within the Artisanal line, Margiela’s way of reassembling old garments and materials connected strongly with Galliano’s couture-style storytelling. What’s dismantled doesn’t end as mere critique—it rises again like a beautiful mirage. That is the charm of Margiela in the Galliano era.
I think the 2024 Artisanal collection was one of its peak moments: the show under the Pont Alexandre III, skin like porcelain dolls, silhouettes that exaggerate the body, a mood like a wet night. Among recent fashion shows, it left a remarkably powerful impression.
Galliano returned theatricality to Margiela.
At this point, Margiela became the “brand you want to see” again. Not just clipped into fragments on social media, but told as an entire show—one dream. Galliano returned theatricality to Margiela.
But that dream was far too complete—beautiful, deep, drenched, and impossible to forget.
So the next designer will have to stand in a difficult place: continue Galliano’s dream? Or wake up from that dream and return once again to the structure of the garments?
That’s where Glenn Martens appears.
Glenn Martens is—
Why does it fit Margiela?
GLenn Martens is a designer with a distinctly Margiela-like sensibility. However, it’s not a copy of Martin Margiela.
He’s from Belgium, trained in Antwerp, and at Y/Project and Diesel he has twisted and shifted the structure of clothing, turning everyday wear into something strange. In his clothes, there’s an interesting quality to it—more like the garments are a little malfunctioning—rather than a strictly correct kind of beauty.
The denim twists.
The knitwear deforms.
The structure of the jacket shifts.
There isn’t just one fixed way to wear it.
At first glance it seems like a joke, but in reality, he understands the mechanics of clothing very deeply.
Martens’s strength is turning the avant-garde into something you can actually wear.
Martens’s strength is turning the avant-garde into something you can actually wear.
At Y/Project, they created a playful, intelligent wardrobe while changing the form of the clothes. At Diesel, they used an extremely mainstream material like denim and rekindled the brand’s energy for younger generations.
This is where it matters.
Margiela is a conceptual brand. But in contemporary luxury, concepts alone can’t last. The clothes must be wanted as garments. Wanted as bags and shoes. Left behind not only through the secondhand market and archives, but also integrated into the wearer’s actual wardrobe—not just flashed for a moment on SNS.
Martens is a designer who handles that balance extremely well.
If Galliano returned dreams to Margiela, then Martens may return “wearable distortions” to that space. That would be a fairly major difference.
After Galliano
What should be reconstructed
In that case, what will Martens reconstruct at Maison Margiela?
First is anonymity.
However, unlike the Martin Margiela era, I don’t think it’s possible to completely erase the face anymore. Today’s fashion is driven by designers’ faces, celebrities, SNS, the front row, memes, and interviews. You can’t simply revive anonymity itself the way it used to be.
So what is anonymity in today’s era?
I think it means leaving behind not “one person’s face” inside the clothing, but the construction mechanics, the memories of the materials, and the wearer’s interpretation.
In Martens’s Margiela, it likely becomes less about erasing the face and more about not fixing the meaning of the garment to a single interpretation. This is a dress. This is a jacket. This is the correct way to wear it. Rather than deciding everything, the clothes look slightly different depending on who wears them.
It’s that very ambiguity that may become Margiela-like anonymity for today.
The second is the reconstruction of everyday clothing.
What made Martin Margiela interesting wasn’t only the dream of couture, but also the power to shift everyday clothing. White shirts, knits, denim, coats, jackets, shoes. Everyone knows these clothes—yet he turns them slightly strange. That sense of wrongness updates the wearer’s perception.
Martens has a lot of strength here. Looking at his denim at Diesel and his deformed wardrobes at Y/Project, he isn’t just making everyday wear more refined—he’s a designer who can introduce a misalignment into everyday clothes.
If Galliano-era Margiela heightened the density of the dream, wouldn’t Martens-era Margiela be moving in the direction of returning wonder to real everyday clothes?
The third is what Artisanal means.
Artisanal is a very important line for Margiela: old pieces, discarded materials, existing garments, handwork, and reconstruction. Through them, you create clothes with an intensity close to one-of-a-kind.
This way of thinking is highly compatible with the present era.
Because in today’s fashion, sustainability and upcycling are widely discussed, yet Margiela has treated them as aesthetics long before they became buzzwords. Using old materials wasn’t just about caring for the environment—it was a way to create a garment’s memories and a sense of unease.
How Martens handles this is extremely important. If he brings Artisanal back from Galliano-like dream theater into more of a materials-and-structure laboratory, Margiela will once again become a very contemporary brand.
The directions seen in the early Martens era
MIn the early movements of artens’ Maison Margiela, you can already see several directions.
First, he isn’t completely denying Galliano. That matters.
When a new designer joins, there can be a desire to erase the colors of the predecessor. But it looks like Martens hasn’t fully let go of the theatricality, darkness, and tension in relation to the body that Galliano created.
On the other hand, the way it’s presented is slightly different. If Galliano created wet dreams and stories, then Martens shows things through material, surface, and misalignment in a stronger way. It feels less like telling emotions and more like the clothes themselves transform into something unsettling.
At the 2025 Artisanal debut, the influence of masks, worn surfaces, a gothic atmosphere, and a reconstructed sense of materials came through strongly. Overlapping there were Margiela’s signature anonymity and Martens’s kind of structural distortion.
In the ongoing ready-to-wear line, more pieces closer to everyday life have started to appear—trench coats, denim, leather, shoes, bags. In other words, it seems Martens is trying to bring Margiela back into the real wardrobe, not confine it to the dream of couture alone.
If this balance is achieved, it will be quite powerful.
Margiela can be too concept-driven, choosing the people who can actually wear it. On the other hand, if it became only clothes that would sell easily, the meaning of being Margiela would fade.
What Martens is looking for is that in-between. It looks normal at first glance, but if you look closely, something is off. It’s wearable, yet you feel compelled to explain it. It’s everyday clothing, but it’s slightly out of sync with reality.
I think this is the right kind of warmth that Margiela needs right now.
Why is Margiela drawing attention now?
It’s drawing attention to Maison Margiela for several reasons.
First, the fact that the end of the Galliano era was so powerful. The 2024 Artisanal became a major talking point even within the fashion industry. Because of that show, Margiela was widely recognized again as a brand you should see. And with the designer changing right after that, expectations naturally rise for the next chapter.
Next is attention on Martens himself. He’s a designer who can drive both high fashion and mainstream energy—through his experimental work at Y/Project, his reinvention at Diesel, and collaborations such as with H&M. In today’s world, this is quite important.
Luxury today can’t be simply “expensive.” It’s expected to have buzz, cultural meaning, and still move as a product. Martens has the potential to connect all three.
And finally, the Margiela brand itself is well-suited to the times we live in now.
More archives than new items.
More space than completion.
More codes than logos.
More individuality than mass production.
Unease that makes you think, rather than easy-to-understand beauty.
The value that fashion lovers today are looking for is quite Margiela-like. That’s exactly why Margiela in the Martens era has the potential to connect very strongly—not just to a new regime, but to the mood of the present day.
What Margiela will be like from here
Where it’s headed
こvering what comes next, I think Maison Margiela will likely move in three directions.
First is the reconstruction of the wardrobe.
Jackets, shirts, denim, trench coats, knits, bags, shoes. Rebuild everyday clothes with Margiela-style unease. This is the area where Martens is most at home.
Second is reinterpreting the icons.
Tabi, 5AC, Glam Slam, four stitches. Margiela already has powerful icons. But if you simply repeat them as bestsellers, the brand can start to look like it’s stopped. Martens will likely reshape the icons a little and update them into something more unsettling, more youthful, and more contemporary.
Third is bringing Artisanal closer to ready-to-wear.
To what extent can experiments in couture be translated into everyday clothing? This is extremely important for Margiela. Not only to surprise on the runway, but to have that way of thinking flow into jackets, bags, shoes, and accessories. Only once it reaches that point does Martens-era Margiela become a strong era.
And this is also where it gets interesting from the perspective of secondary resale and archives.
Items from the Martin Margiela era already carry strong value as archives. Even the Galliano era—especially from around 2024’s Artisanal onward—should become even easier to talk about going forward. And early pieces from the Martens era may be seen as a turning point for the Maison.
A brand’s value doesn’t rise just because it’s old. It’s made at a turning point when the times change. It’s something released early in a designer’s career. It’s an item that, when looked back on later, hinted at where the direction would go. With items like that, an intriguing archive value is born.
I think Margiela in the Martens era is right at the entrance of it all—right now.
Margiela is a brand that places small questions into clothing.
Because there’s that question, styling becomes deeper.
When viewing Maison Margiela as MOOD, what draws you in isn’t “clearly beautiful clothes,” but clothes that make you think a little.
Tabi at the feet.
A restrained emblem of four stitches.
A structure turned inside out.
A silhouette where the distance from the body is slightly shifted.
A sense of presenting old things as new.
Margiela’s clothing and accessories don’t offer instant answers to how you should dress. That’s exactly why there’s room for the wearer’s interpretation.
Galliano poured dreams and theatricality into that space. Wouldn’t Martens, in turn, bring back everyday distortions—and the sheer fun of the garments themselves?
Even in MOOD styling, Margiela is an extremely important presence. Pair Tabi with classic garments. Carry a Margiela bag with a vintage shirt. Place shoes with just a hint of unease at the bottom of a crisp jacket. Just like that, your outfit stops being merely pretty.
Margiela is a brand that places small questions into clothing. And because those questions exist, styling grows deeper.
After Galliano’s dream, what will Martens reconstruct? It’s not only about a single Maison Margiela. It connects to a major question about how the future of luxury will handle archives, everyday wear, craft, unease, and the wearer’s interpretation.
Not through flashy logos, but by lingering in memory with a quiet mismatch. Not by delivering fully finished beauty, but by leaving a little unfinished space. If that value becomes even stronger again, Martens-era Margiela is bound to get really interesting from here.
In summary — Margiela wakes from its dream and becomes clothing again
Maison Margiela changed the way people see fashion through Martin Margiela. John Galliano brought back the power to dream. And then, with Glenn Martens, they’re trying—once again—to bring that sense of unease back into everyday clothing.
This is not a return to the past.
Not about recreating Martin’s era, nor about repeating Galliano’s theatrical visions. Rather, it’s a stage where, having passed through both, we explore what Margiela can do for this current age.
Today’s luxury calls for more than a strong logo. It needs a background, meaning in the construction, a space for the wearer to interpret, and something that will endure. With those conditions in mind, Margiela is in a very strong position.
After Galliano’s dream comes what Martens reconstructs. Perhaps it’s Maison Margiela’s “ability to return clothes to themselves.”
Not just a beautiful dream—clothes that seep into the reality of your wardrobe, and quietly change your perspective. I think it’s precisely that small sense of unease that will become Margiela’s value going forward.
