Can religious fashion appeal to the whole world? | CNN

When Glenn Martens became the creative director of Paris-based fashion house Maison Margiela in January 2025, he expected to never show his face again.

After all, the founder of this brand, Martin Margiela, is rarely seen. It has been. Anonymity was the key to the Belgian concept of clothing: in contrast to the big, commercial and pop, he saw fashion as small, artistic, impossible. He covered the models’ faces with masks and dressed his staff in white lab coats. In the famous picture of 2001, captured by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue, all the workers are standing armed with their white coats, the seat left empty in the front row for the designer.

Those who took over the brand after Margiela’s retirement in 2009 followed closely: Matthieu Blazy (the man who now leads the biggest fashion brand, Chanel) was not publicly recognized as Margiela’s creative leader until journalist Suzy Menkes “outed him” in 2014. More recently, John Galligeano used the house’s designer as a protest against the house’s designer John. he revived his reputation after a series of anti-decency scandals led to his ouster from French fashion monolith Dior in 2011.

But on a beautiful afternoon in Paris in March, Martens found himself reluctantly in front of the camera, without a mask but wearing a white jacket in his newly whitened office – a nod to what the name calls Bianchetto, or covering clothes, accessories and other areas in white so that the wear and tear of life becomes a kind of sign of beauty, not a blemish.

He was facing the camera to talk about how to make a brand whose reputation was built by speaking to a small audience of clothing experts, feeling important around the world. And to start, he leaves the capital of fashion culture, Paris, and takes Margiela to China, where he will make a big show on April 1, followed by weeks of programming, free and open to the public, that will bring the ethos of Margiela to the masses.

“Look at me, I should be there [off camera] — hidden,” he said, smiling, “I always said to him” — here, he gestured to Margiela’s chief marketing officer, sitting nearby — “from the beginning, I will not be a spokesperson for the brand. Look at me, a year later: BAM!”

Martens, 42 years old (and Belgian, like Margiela himself), lives in a different era than even his famous predecessors did a few years ago. There’s no avant-garde style to speak of, really; every brand, from logo-driven mega labels to art house darlings, has to put celebrities in their clothes. Everyone has to deal with social media; even if your clothes are for the few, you have to know that everyone in the world can see them – and give their opinion, good or bad. Martens knows this: at the denim brand Diesel, where he is also the creative director, and before that, for the dysfunctional spunky-punky Y/Project, he made art by creating strange ideas like twisted hems and closed fabrics that feel like the foundations of the big ideas of TikTok.

But Martens doesn’t want to do “one-hit wonders,” as he calls catnip media kits that go viral, and then disappear. He wants Margiela to represent an understated form of beauty, sophistication, and the most loaded word of all, luxury.

Luxury is now synonymous with first-class airport seats and overpriced, hard-to-find handbags. For Martens, it’s about pushing another way of thinking and creating: “It’s all about fixing things, working differently, trying to find something different from the industry,” like a fabric found in a thrift store rather than an exclusive French mill, or a life-size dress from a junk shop porcelain doll. “But it’s working on it so hard that quality becomes couture.”

So you make a cult brand feel like a global business?

Martens said: “Maison Margiela has always been a person who likes to explore and express himself. He wants the brand to speak to “everyone, not just [focus] in our way of thinking. ”

Even if you can’t pay for Margiela, looking, learning and thinking about it is free – the concept included in the Chinese program, which will take place in many cities for many weeks, as Martens said, “is free and open to the public.” He’s showing his Fall 2026 couture (or in the parlance of the house, Artisanal) and ready-to-wear in Shanghai on Wednesday, as well as a downtown street presentation of Artisanal looks from across two decades of Margiela’s history; an exhibition of some of the world’s fiercest Tabi collectors in Chengdu; an opportunity for the public to bring a dress and give it a DIY Bianchetto treatment in Shenzhen; and testing of these masks in Beijing. The commitment was announced in a new project called Maison Margiela/folders, which makes all images and research accessible only to the press and staff, available to everyone.

Why China? The country, with its fashion-conscious consumers, has become an industrial haven. As of 2019, Maison Margiela has opened 26 stores there, and Martens wanted to better connect with the brand’s fans there. “When you meet people, you create strong bonds. That’s why we decided to cancel fashion weeks in Paris,” he said. “It’s important and important to be there.”

“We don’t really do couture in the old fashioned way,” Martens explained, standing in front of a recreation of Edwardian dress inspired by the ensembles worn by porcelain dolls of the time. She and her team made the dresses fit a modern person (not a doll), and then, in honor of China’s long history of using candle wax and even cosmetics, dipped the entire dress in beeswax to give it a ghostly aura. It’s the kind of piece that’s made to order, maybe just for a customer or two, not couture in the traditional French sense, but more specifically in Margiela’s words.

Get a therapy dog ​​- and give him a little coat

“When a creative director arrives at a new house, everyone gets stressed because they don’t know what to expect,” Martens said. “I joined this company where it was almost like that.” And two weeks later, I got a dog” – Murphy – “which changed the whole atmosphere. Suddenly, everyone was the best – very happy. So he is the official therapy dog ​​of Maison Margiela.”

Dressing celebrities is essential to the life of any fashion house; The right celebrity in your outfit can mean millions of dollars and increase brand recognition.

But for a label whose values ​​are at odds with celebrity opinion – a founder who doesn’t take photos; refusing to pay people to wear its clothes – Martens’ order is strict.

Instead, he sees Margiela as a time for celebrities to reinvent themselves. He talks about Kim Kardashian, who was one of the first to wear his couture designs: “I’m really a social person; Margiela is very close,” he said. But, “when he plays Margiela, he becomes Margiela.”

Martens knows the ins and outs of social media more fluently than most designers working today: he firmly believes in letting everyone in, yet he also knows that doing so risks criticism and, increasingly, the vitriol of online commentators. Lips similar to Margiela’s white four-stick logo, which were featured on Martens’ ready-to-wear models last fall, were criticized for their demeaning effect.

“You’re going to get hit in different directions,” Martens said. “What we have to do now – what I have to do now, and I hope my colleagues in other houses will do now – is try to stay calm and focus on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and not listen to all the noise around it.

Martens plans to shout, if not out loud, then more instinctively.

Video by Mark Esplin and Phil Clarke Hill.