‘It’s about actuality’: Glenn Martens on creating garments to stay in at Maison Margiela

On a still-warm Paris day final October, daylight streamed by way of the vaulted glass ceiling of the Centquatre, an arts centre within the nineteenth arrondissement, the place visitors had gathered for Glenn Martens’ first ready-to-wear present for Maison Margiela. A former funeral parlour, accomplished within the late 1800s, the huge primary corridor had been reworked for the event: sheathed in trompe l’oeil white curtains and lined with benches – themselves wrapped in white material – the scene included a 61-piece orchestra, at that time empty of its gamers (this was additionally rendered in white, from its music stands to a dramatic grand piano, a nod to deal with founder Martin Margiela’s favoured hue). Such was the piercing brightness, most of the attendees stored on their sun shades or just squinted into the sunshine.

Then arrived the orchestra: a merry band of youngsters, clutching devices and clad in ill-fitting fits, some so massive that the hemlines dragged alongside the bottom just like the prepare of a costume. They performed with gusto, blasting by way of classical music’s best hits – from the booming Dawn fanfare from Strauss’ Additionally Sprach Zarathustra to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 – as fashions, lips prised open with steel mouthpieces, started to parade across the house. The sound was deliriously off-key and out of time, however the youngsters had been charming (hailing from Romilly-sur-Seine and aged seven to fifteen, they’re a part of Orchestre à l’École, which turns native lecture rooms into orchestras; some had been studying for only a few months).

There’s a well-known {photograph} of Martin Margiela’s S/S 1990 runway present, held in 1989 in an deserted playground in Paris’ twentieth arrondissement, then largely populated by North African immigrants. In it, smiling native youngsters scamper amongst fashions’ toes as visitors crouch – some visibly open-mouthed on the spectacle – alongside the runway. As of late, it has develop into commonplace for designers to hunt out obscure settings for his or her exhibits, however again then, it was a daring riposte to the shiny, amped-up choices of the Nineteen Eighties; its uneven flooring, free-for-all seating and improvised electrics (the Margiela staff begged these in surrounding residences to permit them to plug in cables for lights and music) a far cry from the gilded resort ballrooms typical of the period’s style weeks.

It was a motive, maybe, for the scathing opinions that adopted within the press, however for a lot of within the room – together with a few of the subsequent era of style designers, like Raf Simons, who had snuck in – it was a revolution. ‘Martin’s was the primary present I ever attended,’ Simons mentioned in 2016. ‘I used to be so struck by every thing I used to be seeing that I began to cry. I felt so embarrassed. I used to be like, “Take a look at the bottom, take a look at the bottom, everybody’s going to see you’re crying”. Like, how silly to be crying at a style present. Then I regarded round, and half the viewers was crying.’

‘I needed to do one thing democratic,’ says Martens, noting that, relating to ready-to-wear, he needs to do one thing actual – ‘by no means treasured’. The youngsters’s orchestra was a part of that: in spite of everything, Maison Margiela – or Maison Martin Margiela, because it was first based by its namesake designer and enterprise accomplice Jenny Meirens – has by no means been about perfection. Martin Margiela’s most memorable designs had been those who had been torn aside at their seams or turned inside out; daubed with paint or constructed from disparate discovered objects, from damaged plates to outdated butcher’s aprons. At each Y/Undertaking – the place Martens was for 11 years – and Diesel, the place he’s inventive director, he has favoured an identical irreverence. For his S/S26 assortment for Diesel, fashions had been scattered in plastic ‘eggs’ round Milan; materials got here from intriguing experiments in mixing satin and denim, or bonded jersey, purposely cracked and damaged throughout its floor.

Martens thinks there’s something Belgian about this strategy. Martin Margiela was born in Genk in Belgium’s east, Martens in Bruges within the west; each ended up finding out at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Tremendous Arts (the establishment additionally birthed the Antwerp Six, which might put Belgian style on the map). ‘In Belgium, it’s at all times raining, however they nonetheless stroll to a restaurant of their fanciest garments and massive boots, by no means taking a taxi,’ says Martens. ‘They drink wine out of a plastic cup; they’re so not treasured. It doesn’t imply they don’t seem to be beautiful and exquisite, however they’re nonetheless going to stroll their canine across the park.’ It was a temper he sought to encapsulate with the S/S 2026 assortment, described as ‘a collection of ideas and proposals for actual life’ within the press notes. ‘So even with the actually lovely robes, I would like them to really feel a bit off. It’s about actuality.’

The S/S 2026 ready-to-wear assortment was not the primary assortment that Martens had designed for Maison Margiela, or certainly proven: final July, he offered an Artisanal assortment (the equal to different homes’ high fashion strains) throughout Haute Couture Week, which marked his debut correct. Held within the basement of the Centquatre, the place peeling trompe l’oeil wallpaper evoked the light grandeur of nation manor homes – as if fashions had been dragged by way of the tattered partitions of time – the gathering was one in all unusual, undone opulence, drawing inspiration from the structure of medieval Flanders. Billowing robes had been rendered in molten metallic organza, whereas Renaissance-inspired jacquards and leather-based embossed with motifs from Sixteenth-century Flemish wallpaper had been patchworked collectively. Lastly, every look got here with a masks – some embellished with crystals, others in hammered steel – a nod to a Margiela precept (masks featured all through Martin Margiela’s collections, whereas the designer refused to disclose his personal face).