It was Milan Fashion Week’s first major show: 1 p.m. on Day 1.
Every seat in the cavernous warehouse space, decked out with giant inflatable denim-covered bombshells and fat monkeys, was full. Some of those in attendance seemed to come straight from the airport. Tim Blanks, the critic of Business of Fashion, was on the show for the first time in years. Ditto the editor and curator Stefano Tonchi. Julia Fox, the celebrity magnet of the moment, was in the front row. Renzo Rosso, mogul, owner of Only the Brave, one of the few Italian conglomerates, presided, a giant smile on his face.
All to see the new Diesel collection.
Wait… Diesel? The rock and roll jeans brand?
Diesel, the one-off rock ‘n’ roll jeans brand now designed by Glenn Martens.
It was the third leg of a trifecta of shows from Mr. Martens since the beginning of the year that together have catapulted him from niche conceptualist, beloved by high-minded industry insiders, fashion freaks and art school students, to the status of first major designer of 2022.
On January 19, there was a joint men’s and women’s show for Y/Project, the French cult brand he acquired in 2013, which featured net tank tops and skirts and pants screen-printed with male and female torsos and groins that matched seemingly randomly, in a non-random manner. so-random commentary on the wider conversation around gender and identity.
The following week came his first-ever couture collection as guest designer for Jean Paul Gaultier, complete with ball gowns so voluminous they resembled foaming seas and mermaid dresses made of shredded strips of silk ribbon, like an infinity corset.
Three weeks later, Diesel came out with its 1000 forms of denim: tufted, frayed, collaged, chromed, recycled, reinvented.
Martens isn’t the first designer to try multiple brands at once (currently Jonathan Anderson with JW Anderson and Loewe and Raf Simons with his own brand and Prada are among those doing duplication), but he may be the first to embrace such seemingly disparate homes to equal acclaim.
Watching the Diesel show “brought me to tears,” said Mr Rosso afterwards. “His handling of denim is something we’ve never seen before.”
He is, said Mr Tonchi, “afraid of nothing.”
when mr. Martens was named chairman of the fashion jury for the 37th edition of the Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography, the Cannes Film Festival of fashion awards, his metamorphosis from genius mad to industrial Olympian seemed complete. But now that everyone is finally watching, what is he doing now?
Too weird, too much
“We never preached that we’re going to make beautiful silhouettes,” said Mr Martens, 38, a few weeks before the Diesel show. “A lot of what we do is push boundaries, and a lot of people in the past said, ‘Why?’” He talked about Y/Project and Zooming in via video from his Y/Project office in Paris.
He wore his usual uniform: an old black sweater he’d bought at a London outlet, black jeans, and a faded baseball cap. He had two chains around his neck, a ring in his ear and two rings on his fingers, and he was half shaved.
Y/Project, he said, “had been around for so many years doing this experimental design and quirky stuff and nobody cared. It was crazy, it was all too much. They had a stroke after the third look.” Even the staff, he said, often had “a moment in an adjustment when we looked at our design and thought, ‘Are we seriously going to do this?'”
You get the feeling that when that question is asked, Mr. Martens thinks he is on the right track.
Founded in 2010 by the designer Yohan Serfaty, Y/Project was initially known for its dark and moody menswear. When Mr Serfaty died just three years after the label was launched, his business partner, Gilles Elalouf, asked the Chambre Syndicale, the governing body of French fashion, who he would recommend taking over.
“I was the cheapest,” said Mr. Martens.
He also trained at the fashion academy in Antwerp, where after a rough start – “I was always on the verge of failure,” he graduated first in his class, found a job with Mr Gaultier before finally starting his own business. label.
“I was a very bad assistant,” said Mr. Martens. “I have no patience. I don’t want to listen to people. I always think I can do something better or different.”
When Y/Project came along, he closed his label, started the women’s line and ran it as a thought experiment. Each season starts with the design staff sitting around a table and putting forward ideas and sketches on how to mess with the way clothes are made. How to play with multiple lapels on one garment so it looks like a few different jackets in one; cut jeans on the thigh, then fasten them again so that they resemble suspenders or diapers; use thread to transform hems and lapels into endlessly interchangeable sculptures.
The results are smart and don’t look like anything else, and they’re often funny — the kind of garments that cause double shots and send High Fashion Twitter into a tizzy. But Y/Project is also the kind of brand with an influence within fashion (and on other designers) far greater than outside sales.
In 2020, for example, when Rihanna and Celine Dion had both appeared in the cropped pants, Y/Project still had sales between the single and double digits. All of this could normally make him an unexpected candidate for a massively appealing brand like Diesel, which led to its parent company, OTB, achieving more than $1 billion in sales by 2021.
A fashion Trojan horse
Yet, Mr Rosso, who had met Mr Martens when Y/Project won the Andam, the most important French fashion award, in 2017 (Mr Rosso was a jury member) and later collaborated with him on a Diesel capsule project, wasn’t the only major brand magnate who saw potential in his rare combination of irreverent attitude and couture spirit.
Mr Martens said he was in talks at several points to work with Donatella Versace at Versace (this was during her very publicly classified heir search, which ended inconclusively when the brand was sold to Capri Holdings, which owns by Michael Kors) and Kenzo. He also said he disagreed with the Diesel job until Mr. Rosso expanded it to include the whole creative side: apparel, licensing, marketing and store design.
According to Mr. Martens, Diesel serves a different purpose than Y/Project. “Diesel is much more social,” he said. “This is the only way I can talk to so many people.” Whether people buy the clothes or not, they are, he said, “following you and paying attention to you.” For him, the decision to sign up was personal.
“My mother, who’s a nurse, isn’t getting Y/Project at all,” Mr. Martens said. She raised him and his older brother as a single parent in Bruges, Belgium, and worked as a cleaning lady on weekends. Her parents, who helped to care for the boys, were both from military families and were, he said, “very strict.” However, his father was not much in the picture to be father was a sculptor who worked with mirrors and made stained glass windows, and that’s where Mr. Martens thinks he sparked his interest in design.
His mother “thinks I’m psychic,” he continued. “When she sees the Y/Project clothing, she thinks, ‘Who’s going to wear this?’ My older brother, who is a firefighter, doesn’t understand Y/Project, but my brother does buy diesel.”
Also, Mr Martens said he remembered Diesel ads from his childhood, especially the two men kissing campaign. “It might have been the very first time I saw something like that,” he said. “It helps people — definitely helped me.”
He sees the brand as a kind of fashion Trojan horse that can lead to sustainability: ecologically and socially. (He’s been focused on responsible fashion since helping his former teacher Bruno Pieters set up Honest By in 2012, a brand known for publishing all purchasing information and price increases for every garment.) He created the Diesel Library, which only evergreen styles made with eco-friendly materials and treatments with QR codes on the label to explain provenance, as well as a program to use leftover scrap from the factories as shop windows. Scrap is also recycled into new denim, known as ‘rehab denim’.
And he said, “It’s kind of fun to make clothes that you think are good, that make people feel good and comfortable and like they’re going to nail life.”
The definition of success
Mr Martens normally spends two days a week in Paris at Y/Project and three at Diesel in Italy. He said he doesn’t find it difficult to balance the two, but when the Gaultier guest appearance was added to the schedule, things got a little hectic. The first two months of the year he only had one weekend off. He went camping, which he does to relax rather than go to concerts or art exhibitions – although he also enjoys exploring historic palaces.
“I was very spartan — work, sleep, work, sleep,” he said. “Maybe a glass of red wine.” He calls himself ‘a specialist with leftovers’. He is currently single and has no pets, which makes it easier to devote so much time to his work. So is the fact that the rest of the world has finally woken up to what he can do.
Sales of Y/Project have grown exponentially during the pandemic. “It’s finally our moment,” he said. “Now people get it, so we can finally grow.”
But not too much. “If you start at some point with the whole thing of pre-collections and so forth, you kind of start to lose your message,” he said. He turned and closed his door because, he said, his staff was laughing at him.
Still, he’s hopeful that a new bag — the wire bag, which can be squeezed into all sorts of different shapes — will hit the accessory jackpot. “Anyone can get a good pay raise, have an apartment and live a happy life and go on vacation wherever they want,” he said. He has no interest in reviving his own brand and seeing his name hanging over the door; Y/Project gives him all the freedom he needs, and Diesel all the scope. Although that couture experiment was quite satisfying.
“A lot of people thought I was a very quirky designer, and that made me a bit marginalized,” said Mr. martens. “That’s fine, I really didn’t care. But now that I have these three platforms, I can prove to people that I also understand what the market wants and where I should and should not push.”
He gave a kind of sly little smile. “I’ve always felt like I could do it,” he says.
