The creative director who led Y/Project and is leading Diesel is known for one thing, Margiela is known for another, and the real intrigue is in how they’ll intersect
It’s official: Glenn Martens, the Belgian designer behind Y/Project’s deconstructed cool and Diesel’s denim renaissance, is now the creative director of Maison Margiela. A designer who’s made a career out of bending, warping, and rethinking fashion is stepping into the house known for its cerebral, elusive, and often downright enigmatic approach. The question isn’t just what he’ll do—it’s how he’ll meet the standards of a house that thrives on defying them.
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The Resume Speaks for Itself
Martens has built a reputation as fashion’s manipulator—of silhouettes, of textiles, of the very idea of clothing itself. At Y/Project, he turned everyday staples into mind-bending statement pieces. A blazer wasn’t just a blazer; it was a three-piece optical illusion. Denim became an art project, capable of warping, twisting, and expanding past its utilitarian roots. At Diesel, he took a fading relic of the 2000s and made it relevant again, proving he’s got commercial instincts to match his experimental personality.



His appointment comes at a time when Y/Project officially shuttered its doors just this January due to its inability to find a buyer after a difficult year marked by administrative and creative adjustments that harmed its financial performance. The shutdown was also punctuated by the death of Gilles Elalouf, the brand’s late CEO and founder who had been its engine since 2010. Martens, who had led Y/Project for over a decade, stepped down as creative director in September, with his Fall/Winter 2024 collection serving as his farewell.




With a portfolio that blends the avant-garde with mass appeal, Martens is uniquely positioned to take Margiela forward. The house succeeds in weirdness, the kind that can turn a tabi boot into a pop-culture phenomenon or make a dress look like it’s mid-disintegration while still commanding five figures. Martens gets that kind of tension. The trick will be finding the balance between his signature deconstruction and the house’s ghostly structure.
Can He Handle the Legacy?
Maison Margiela is a house built on contradiction—anonymity and recognition, distress and precision, the undone and the impossibly calculated. It revels in the mysterious, but it also controls an extreme level of technical skill. John Galliano, Martens’ predecessor, managed to inject couture theatrics into Margiela’s DNA without losing its core identity—turning it into a house of haunted beauty, where garments looked like they had stories to tell.

Martens, for all his technical prowess, has never quite worked with the eerie romanticism that Margiela under Galliano has embraced. His work tends to be about exaggeration, about playing with volume and proportion in a way that requires engagement. Margiela, at its best, is more whisper than scream. Will he soften? Will he rethink his usual instincts? Or will he take the house into a new, hyper-modern, hyper-experimental direction?
The Risks—and the Rewards
Taking over a house like Margiela requires an attitude, a philosophy embodied by a rare few. Will Martens lean into the label’s essence, or will he shake things up with something entirely new? Fashion lives on change, but fashion is also fickle—too much deviation, and purists revolt; too much reverence, and things stagnate. In this case, fashion, like Margiela, is contradictory. Perhaps they’re an ideal match.

If there’s anyone who can navigate that fine line, it’s Martens. He understands structure and subversion, tailoring and disorder. If he plays it right, we could be in for a new era of Margiela: one that’s just as unsettling, unexpected, and undeniably influential as its past.
But if he miscalculates? Well, let’s just say Margiela is a house where failure isn’t just a possibility—it’s part of the mythology. Whether Glenn Martens will subvert expectations or succumb to them remains to be seen.
Photos: MAISON MARGIELA and WHAT THE FROCK (via Reddit), Y/PROJECT and DIESE