Glenn Martens

Glenn Martens originally trained as an interior designer before enrolling in the Fashion Department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. After graduating in 2009, he joined Jean Paul Gaultier. Positions at Weekday, Honest By and Hugo Boss broadened his professional background. Martens launched his own collection in 2012, which he designed for three seasons. Two years later, he became the creative director of Y/Project. With his singular design language, he transformed the French niche label into one of the most influential avant-garde fashion houses. In 2020, he was also appointed creative director of Diesel. Following his departure from Y/Project in 2024, he became creative director of Maison Margiela, where he presented his first couture collection in 2025. The fashion world recognized his talent with the ANDAM Fashion Award in 2017 and 2020. He has also won the Belgian Fashion Award for Designer of the Year twice, in 2018 and 2022.

Layered, twisted, gathered, pleated, oversized… Glenn Martens’ designs for Y/Project broke with symmetry. Martens used contemporary sartorial archetypes from sportswear and streetwear – such as the jumper, the bomber jacket, the tracksuit, and jeans – as a starting point for his complex formal experiments. In his transformable designs – often achieved through the use of flexible wire, Velcro, or press studs – it seems as though one garment merges into the next.

Glenn Martens enjoys enduring creative relationships with like-minded artistic souls, such as make-up artist Inge Grognard and designer Stéphanie D’heygere. Years after interning at Jean Paul Gaultier, the fashion house invited him back to design his debut haute couture collection.

The body as an object of desire is pivotal to Glenn Martens’ work and is reflected in his treatment of textile surfaces with trompe-l'œil prints. Following his guest appearance at Jean Paul Gaultier, Martens went on to collaborate with the fashion house on two projects for Y/Project. For the Autumn-Winter 2022-23 collection, he reinterpreted the iconic print from Gaultier’s Spring-Summer 1996 Cyberbaba collection. Male and female body parts – which sometimes overlap – create the illusion of an X-ray: through the fabric, a draped female body and a muscular male body become visible, or a body that unites both sexes. A second collaboration for Spring-Summer 2023 took inspiration from scans of clothing. Prints of different garments blend into one another. In the print of a worn lace dress, the traces of a moving body can be seen in the imprints of folds, curves, and tension in the fabric.

Martens grew up in Bruges and studied fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Classical art and beauty have shaped his vision. In various collections, he draws on the medieval heritage of his hometown and the work of the Flemish Primitives. These late medieval painters are renowned for their refined depiction of the way fabric falls and drapery. It is a legacy that Martens carries forward in his treatment of textiles. The Autumn-Winter 2024-25 collection featured a number of silhouettes draped in tulle, inspired by the veiled mourning figures on historic Bruges tombstones.

Author: Anaïs Huyghe
Photo above: © Noel Quintela, Make-up: Inge Grognard, Styling: Natacha Voranger. This editorial originally featured in Gruppe Magazine.