No matter it was that we witnessed at Glenn Martens’s Margiela debut, it was wrapped up in an an apparition of fearsome magnificence. In basement chambers lined with layers of peeling paper, a group of elababorately masked folks evoked Gothic sculpture and unusual, antiqued and patch-worked surfaces, generally nearly as in the event that they’d sprung from the partitions themselves.
It takes some guts for a designer to comply with each John Galliano and Martin Margiela, particularly straight into presenting the Artisanal assortment—the equal of high fashion at this home. It wanted somebody daring and fearless sufficient to grab that problem, but good and expert sufficient to not stumble obliviously over a storied previous that many in style maintain sacred. Martens proved himself to be that particular person: a designer who brings his personal peculiarly Belgian sensibility to a label based by a Belgian.
If we’ve been craving a frisson from style, now right here it was, arriving in an odd, characterful type, a imaginative and prescient fraught with poetic imagery rising from darkish corners of medieval historical past to provide a brand new, cracked gloss to the upcycling and repurposing foundations of the home.
“I’m from Bruges, which has this complete gloomy, Gothic type of gloominess,”Martens stated in a preview. “Bruges has this austere vibe of Flanders, which, after all, very a lot connects with Martin. I’m totally different from that technology, however I believe numerous designers are—Martin modified the best way we take a look at garments. So it’s an enormous honor and really humbling expertise to be a part of the home, and naturally coming after John Galliano, the most important couturier in historical past, is much more humbling.”
In a symbolic means, Martens made it a few home, ranging from the richly decayed texture of seventeenth century Flemish embossed leather-based wallpaper, vintage drapes, and the Dutch flower and ‘nature morte’ nonetheless lives of recreation that may have hung in houses of that point. “I’m not a minimalist,” he laughed. In his thoughts, the decaying surfaces of the valuable wallpaper made a reference to the painted and patch-worked strategies Margiela utilized in his first assortment.
After which Martens was off, fashioning a group that was one-third upcycled, making use of paper, photocopying, hand-painting, junk jewellery, and tin plates overwhelmed into a few of the masks. He started with clear plastic seems to be which referred, he stated, to blown glass. Perhaps additionally to Margiela’s dry-cleaning assortment?