In a world where fashion rarely whispers anymore, Glenn Martens chose to do exactly that. During Paris Fashion Week 2025, the designer unveiled his first ready-to-wear collection for Maison Margiela, a show that felt less like a debut and more like a séance. It was an encounter with ghosts the lingering spirits of his Artisanal 2025 haute couture presentation reimagined in a quieter, spectral form. Martens doesn’t start from scratch; he continues a conversation. One that exists somewhere between melancholy and precision, between architecture and emotion.
From the very first look, it was clear this would not be a conventional fashion show but rather a slow, hypnotic unraveling of memory. The runway opened with two black leather coats, long and severe, evoking a gothic sense of authority. Behind them came double breasted vests with rounded necklines, worn without shirts a gesture both intimate and raw. In that calculated exposure, Martens revealed his signature tension: the interplay between control and vulnerability, austerity and desire.
Yet within this darkness flickered traces of delicacy. White ties, lace appliqués, and faded florals softened the severity, casting an almost nostalgic glow across the silhouettes. Martens designs like a sculptor of emotion each textile a fragment of atmosphere, every seam a whisper of sentiment. His world isn’t about dressing bodies; it’s about dressing the space between them.
The collection unfolded like a dream suspended in time. Translucent knits, sheer dresses, and gauzy overlays gave the models a weightless, ghostlike presence, as if they were walking through light rather than on fabric. Martens uses transparency not for seduction, but for symbolism to explore the fragility of identity, the porous line between presence and disappearance.
One of the most haunting moments came when a diaphanous dress was paired with a structured, sculptural jacket, creating the illusion of a spirit wrapped in form. In another, a plaster red corset collided with sky blue floral sleeves and skirt, merging tenderness with tension, vulnerability with violence. In Martens’s hands, beauty is never harmonious it’s fractured, elusive, and full of contradiction.
What truly anchored the show, however, was its quietest detail: a Margiela logo patch fastened to each model’s lips. This stark, disquieting gesture recalled Alexander McQueen’s 1999 show, where models’ mouths were obscured, silenced, controlled. But Martens’s interpretation was not about horror it was about reflection.
Here, the stitched mouth became a metaphor for the loss of voice, a commentary on anonymity, conformity, and the collective identity embedded in Margiela’s DNA. Each model, adorned yet muted, embodied the very ethos of the house: the designer’s invisibility, the wearer’s erasure, and the triumph of concept over self. What might seem grotesque at first glance unfolded as an act of reverence a meditation on how silence can, paradoxically, speak the loudest.
Martens’s technical mastery is undeniable. The construction of SS26 balanced engineered precision with poetic disorder. Every look pulsed with contradictions fragments of “wallpaper” from his earlier Artisanal collection resurfaced as prints on heavily draped dresses; blazers pieced together from decaying canvas panels looked like relics reassembled from a forgotten world. His deconstruction isn’t chaos it’s choreography. Every rip, every asymmetry, every uneven stitch carries intent.
Some silhouettes evoked monastic robes, others 19th-century men’s outerwear, translated into contemporary form through disruption and distortion. The choice of materials washed denim, plasticized surfaces, translucent nylon unsettled conventional ideas of luxury, suggesting that modern elegance lies not in perfection, but in feeling.
Martens understands that the new language of luxury is not about excess, but about meaning. His SS26 silhouettes blur the boundary between the tailored and the streetwise: a crisp white shirt reminiscent of eveningwear was paired with loose black trousers tucked into silver high top sneakers, while black canvas shoes bound in bandages grounded a pinstriped deconstructed blazer. These pairings were deliberate collisions moments where couture collided with real life, and formality dissolved into rebellion.
In doing so, Martens redefined the Margiela equilibrium the fragile balance between intellect and instinct, discipline and disorder. His vision honors the house’s heritage without mimicking it, transforming reverence into renewal.
The SS26 collection was less a show than a ritual a study in silence and collective emotion. Martens created garments that do not demand to be seen; they ask to be felt. The models’ sealed lips, the dissolving fabrics, the ghostlike choreography together they formed a meditation on disappearance, control, and surrender.
In an age where fashion thrives on noise and spectacle, Martens offers an antidote: stillness. His Maison Margiela doesn’t shout; it listens. It reminds us that in the absence of words, the fabric itself becomes language. And perhaps that is the truest luxury of all a silence so deliberate, it echoes.
Photos courtesy of Isidore Montag/Gorunway.com
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