September 21, 2022 |
Fittingly, Glenn Martens joins our Zoom call clad in double denim. Not quite a Canadian tuxedo, but a shredded trucker jacket and matching cap, distressed and slightly frayed at its bill. Shadowing his frame is a plush toy which bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the designer, his stubbled portrait now in pixelated form.
It’s Care Bear-sized in comparison to the towering blow-up dolls which christened his new look for Diesel. “You have to be a bit cheeky,” Martens says of the face-down, arse-up, thong-wearing, 50-foot sculptures which made up the set of his sophomore outing for the fashion giant – harking back to the hypersexual Diesel campaigns that completely reshaped fashion advertising through the 2000s.
The Belgian designer was given the task of reinventing the irreverent design juggernaut in October 2020, unveiling his debut collection in the height of the pandemic via a short film inspired by classic ’90s thriller Run Lola Run. “I got first approached [to join Diesel] before Covid, but I was being an artistic, egocentric arsehole,” he says. Lauded for his Mad Hatter-like approach to design at Y/Project – the conceptual, Parisian label he’s headed since 2013 – taking on a global company meant, at one point to Martens, sacrificing artistic independence wholeheartedly: “I’m first a designer before [a] creative director.”
Then something shifted.
“When Renzo [Rosso, founder of Diesel and president of the OTB group] came back to me after the pandemic, I actually saw the power that Diesel could bring me. Diesel is a lifestyle brand; [if] you talk to people who are not specifically into fashion, you can actually change things.”
His first major gig on the job involved rerouting the brand’s bread and butter. The Diesel Library, designed for responsible living, is a core range of sustainable denim which will have a 50 per cent permanent shelf life in 450 Diesel stores globally. All pieces are made from low-impact materials, recycled trims and techniques that significantly reduce the use of water and chemicals – and all are equipped with traceable QR codes which serve as digital passports for how each garment has been created.
“People having three jobs, three children, working in the week, working on the weekends – they need nice denim like everybody else. The last thing they can think about is sustainability,” says Martens. “My mother was a single mother; she was a nurse during the week, she was a cleaning lady at the weekends because she had to raise two children. She didn’t give a shit about recycling. All she cared about was: ‘Are the boys going to eat tonight?’ Now basic denim has a sustainable approach. So, maybe on the bus on the way from the Diesel store, new mothers will open up their jeans and check the QR code and get to read about sustainability.”
His approach to Diesel is entirely democratic. With 40 years of the brand’s history at his fingertips, he describes arriving at the label as “sitting on a goldmine”. Upon creating his debut catwalk collection, Martens began asking different team members – from the bottom to the top – what Diesel meant for them. Some said rock ’n’ roll and glitzy going-out garb. For others, it’s distinctly straightforward design with sexy attitude, funnelled through the noughties hedonism of the brand’s heyday.
Echoes of such founding values came littered throughout the collection, which opened Milan Fashion Week back in February. Chewed-up and spat out denim in off-kilter, hyper sensual silhouettes met rave-ready clubwear, Jetsons-esque metallic frocks and a D-plated leather belt skirt destined to be next season’s viral mini as soon as it set foot on the red velvet-hued catwalk. There was also an artisanal break of jersey tops and trousers which peeled like flyposters deteriorating in the rain.
It was hotly tipped as the show of the season. An impressive feat considering that, merely a month prior, Martens had carved himself out as one of fashion’s true showmen with not one, but two mind-boggling collections: a mammoth, co-ed Y/Project outing held in a DPD warehouse on the outskirts of Paris and a guest spot designing haute couture for Jean Paul Gaultier.
When Martens joined Y/Project nine years ago – following the untimely passing of its founder, Yohan Serfaty, after a battle with cancer – the company was in bankruptcy. Forced to create interesting runways and innovative collections but strapped for cash, he was obliged to design in a manner whereby pieces could be worn in a multitude of ways, by “making sure the exact same pieces could come back on the runway twice without people noticing.” He soon embraced this topsy-turvy way of creating, concocting highly technical clothes where swollen denim, disjointed sports garb, thigh-high Ugg boots and deconstructed ready-to-wear have become Y/Project’s handwriting. All instead of brash logo placement and overt branding.
“When a customer buys Y/Project, we do not give them an answer, we give them a question,” says Martens. “We push people to really query who they are, what they want to do and what they want to be. It took forever for people to understand the identity of the brand. I’m very proud of what we’ve been doing with Y/Project. It’s not [been] an easy baby, but now it’s a grown-up.”
His high-octane AW22 collection saw Martens make a case for sculptural grandeur, be it cocooning puffer jackets or shearling twinsets threaded with metal wire so the wearer can bend their garments to dress up as they please. Most prominently, a cohort of infrared, trompe-l’oeil nude prints – revived from Gaultier’s SS96 collection – found new meaning via louche suiting and form-clinging crop-tops and slip dresses. No doubt a delight for new-generation fashion fans who scavenge through retail platforms like Depop and Vestiaire Collective to cop their very own slice of fashion history, most of which would’ve been created before they were born.
The looks served as a teaser to Martens’ eagerly anticipated couture debut as the second guest designer of the storied house. Following in the footsteps of Sacai’s Chitose Abe – the first name to create a collection for Gaultier following the designer’s retirement – Martens actually signed his one-show contract for the French maison prior to joining Diesel.
“I did all my research. I already knew where I wanted to go. And I knew my silhouettes and techniques, the collection was already drawn,” Martens says. Did the pressure of having one of luxury fashion’s most revered archives at his fingertips intimidate him? “No, not really. Jean Paul Gaultier has a very clear brand identity. I accepted the job because I love the brand. He really created this goddess of couture and that’s something I love, it’s part of me also. I felt at ease to celebrate the Jean Paul Gaultier woman.”
Working on three lines simultaneously, “was maybe one collection too much”, the designer now admits, “for my personal sake of health and mental peace”. One day a week was spent at Y/Project, another at Gaultier and a further three at Diesel. “At Diesel, we really had to rebuild the language, [with] more love and more care – it was my problem child.” Navigating between the trio, he says, came with ease. “Y/Project is all about being conceptual in construction. Jean Paul Gaultier is all about the beauty of couture and the gowns, and then Diesel has more of a social approach. They’re vastly different but all have a sense of humour; they’re very celebratory.”
While Martens usually finds solace in dressing the subcultures of the present day, his couture debut had tremendous, otherworldly ambition. A hybrid of his own design lexicon with that of Gaultier’s, he envisioned frothy, cloud-like confectioneries – one being worn by Chloë Sevigny on her wedding day in 2022 – alongside floor-grazing cable-knit skirts, a pencil dress frosted with thousands of coral spikes and distinct Gaultier codes (corsetry, stripes) seen through fresh eyes. The collection, he said, “allowed me to unleash my inner club kid”, a full circle moment of sorts, as Martens cut his teeth working at the house as a student at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
“Within the language of fun and sexiness and making life greatly exciting, I’m really trying to open up people’s minds,” says Martens, a visionary who appears to be entering second stride a decade into his career. This is a designer willing to take big swings at convention, at garment construction, and now, at the big league.
Taken from Issue 56 of 10 Men – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
