Martens sent out a clear message to savour the artistry ahead by choosing an engraved silver spoon as the official invitation — a rather fitting metaphor for the immersive spectacle he presented as his debut for the Maison.
Models moved like spectral wraiths, wrapped in jersey that clung like melted marble, towering in capes that hovered behind them like stained-glass shadows. Dresses ballooned into gothic domes; corsetry sliced and framed the body like scaffolding. Even the softness had edge, with veiling that whispered more haunt than romance, tulle that flickered like fog catching candlelight. Silhouettes teetered between the saintly and the profane.
Materials jumped from the sacred to the mundane and back again: plastic crushed into coats, wallpaper prints layered over duchess satin, face masks stitched from biker jackets or crushed metal boxes. Lace dissolved into the skin, and jewellery (beads, deadstock chains) was reworked into fully knitted dresses, weighty and shimmering. One dress resembled a canvas dragged from a forgotten museum wall, hand-painted in trompe-l’œil brushstrokes. Another paired a gold skirt printed with floral wallpaper against a stark corset that looked almost medical. A transparent bustier over a layered underskirt caught the light like stained glass.
Faces disappeared under layers of tulle, organza, or scrap leather, a nod to the house’s long-standing tradition of obscuring identity — although here, it felt more like a gesture of mysticism. You weren’t looking for the wearer; you were tracing the hands behind the clothes, especially with the bridal looks.
Martens reached for the Renaissance, but with a 21st-century eye that manifested fierce, unpolished, and oddly intimate. A stretch-crêpe gown covered in collaged still-life game paintings looked as if it might slink off the body when no one’s watching. A blush lace top and tulle skirt, fragmented into floating panels, hovered in place with an unsettling lightness.
What emerges is a collection that feels both ancient and alien, devotional and defiant. Martens’s Margiela is a Gothic fairytale for the Anthropocene: saints in plastic domes, angels in upcycled biker leather, bodies sculpted and veiled, faces hidden so the handwork can sing.
As he leads Margiela into a new era, Martens is setting the tone for a future where heritage and modernity coexist in tension and harmony, promising a couture house that is as much forward-thinking as it is rooted in its enigmatic past.
Discover the collection here.
photography.
words. Gennaro Costanzo
