In a dark room somewhere on the outskirts of Parisian splendor, far from the classical palaces and red carpets, Maison Margiela presented its Artisanal collection for fall 2025 - a show that resembled not a fashion event, but a ritual with the characteristics of a spiritualistic séance. Glenn Martens, the architect of a new aesthetic of deconstruction, didn't simply continue Martin Margiela's legacy - he conjured it, transformed it and ran it through the filter of his own obsessions. The collection was like a performance without words, where every stitching had meaning, and every silhouette carried a story from the verge of dream, decay and transcendence. What was supposed to be clothing became a theatrical staging of inner chaos - a dramatic dialogue between fashion's past and future, between structure and its decay.
Martens is not looking for approval. He does not flirt with mass luxury. He doesn't want to be understood - his ambition is to strike a balance. The silhouettes appearing on the runway looked like phantoms from another dimension - costumes of ghosts, witch women and post-apocalyptic dandies. The coats resembled relics from the past found in the ruins of palaces, which someone - for unknown reasons - had stitched back together. The dresses looked as if someone had started sewing them in a frenzy of elation, then abandoned them halfway through - not for lack of time, but out of a belief that unfinished speaks better of the world we live in. The DIY elements, the brutalist precision of the imperfections, the rips, the makeshift constructions - it all came together in a manifesto that rang louder than any words.
It was not a fashion to wear. It was fashion to contemplate. The things that appeared on the runway were too intimate, too wild and too furtive to function in the everyday world. And yet they had a power that transcended utilitarian needs - the power of an image that stays under the eyelids. Martens took what has always been most interesting about Margiela: the tension between presence and absence, structure and disintegration, form and chaos. The fabrics here became an architecture of emotions - the transparencies revealed more than just the body, the layering brought to mind stories hidden deep under the skin. These were clothes that don't dress - they deconstruct, unmask, and remind us that every aesthetic is political.
Martens is not so much inspired by Margiela as he is engaged in a rough but respectful dialogue with his spirit. This season he goes even deeper into the registers of theatricality, evoking the aesthetics of neo-Gothic, decadence, and Baroque overexpression, but he does so with a severity appropriate to a generation that trusts nothing too smooth. These silhouettes have something of the characters played by Jean Cocteau and something of the children of punk who are just learning to sew. Their strength lies precisely in this range - from mysticism to raw craftsmanship, from elegance to destruction. It's no longer about the clothes, it's about the atmosphere - heavy, intimate, overloaded with meaning. Each step of the model was like entering a new scene. Every seam - like an assembly cut.
The Artisanal 2025 collection cannot be easily described - because it was not created to be described. It's a show that has to be experienced, filtered through one's own sensibility, and then left behind like a dream that can't be fully remembered. In a world where everything has to be ready to be photographed, to be sold, to be published - Martens creates things that have to be absorbed in analog: slowly, without immediate satisfaction, with a quiet anxiety that stays in the body long after leaving the fashion theater.
In this collection, couture ceases to be a luxury and becomes a tool of resistance. DIY is not a trend - it's a philosophy that says: create with what you have, create in spite of yourself, create out of necessity, not for the sake of applause. Martens shows that the hand - not the machine - still has something to say. That fashion, even the highest fashion, can be raw, rude, deeply personal. Maison Margiela in his interpretation is no longer just a fashion house. It is a place of initiation.
Photos courtesy of Maison Margiela
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