Glenn Martens started with Haute Couture at Maison Margiela last summer and showed he is up to the task. Now he delivered a very basic but strong ready to wear collection which safely steers the brand back into the rougher Belgian territory it belongs to. There was a lot of repurposed black leather, denim and gaffer tape usage in the show which revealed a good instinct to underline that Margiela is about a certain weathered and tough charm and not the flights of fancy Galliano took the brand on. Martens is Belgian and his Y/Project shows always distilled a certain rough and hard charm by working the hell out of denim and leather often combining them.

This show was opened with black leather tailoring and had its highlights in its straightforward men’s look and beautiful dresses for women which were often see through and taped together or had prettiness coming from floral elements. Martens and his studio literally peeled off 16^thcentury floral wallpaper and printed the flowers onto paper and fused them with the dresses that were often cinched at the waist. It may still lack the next dimension, but it was a refreshing going back to basics collection. Even the beautiful idea of having a children’s orchestra which played classics like Richard Strauss’ An der schönen blauen Donau injecting multiple wrong notes to the amusement of the audience. This was the kind of Margiela surprise which was not part of Galliano’s universe.

The men’s wear?

Men’s was very strong, and we loved a look of a knee length chambray coat with a silk scarf fused onto the lapel worn with a V-neck white T-shirt and sliced open at the knee jeans which had a long rectangular layer of a lighter wash denim patched on combined with buckled brown suede boots. A classic Margiela staple fixing the scarves as if they were part of the garment, and there is nobody out there making this kind of menswear now. Also, a see through white shirt which had the black vest peeping out. Eureka.

The big question mark?

To achieve uniformity of the models’ facial expressions, they all had some kind of dentist mouthpiece inserted leaving their faces stiff. Adding the fourstitch branding here seemed a bit over the top.