Glenn Martens brings his signature chaos and craft to H&M, reimagining British archetypes with anarchic charm and royal irreverence
Glenn Martens insists on showing us his underwear. “It’s the most important thing!” he jokes as he hoiks up his gray knit sweater and tugs down the top of his black denim jeans: “Because look!”
Martens is here on the last day of Paris Fashion Week to reveal our first glimpse of something big, exciting, and ready to launch: his new collection with H&M. The Swedish fashion retailer has tapped the Belgian fashion maverick to become its latest designer collaborator. By doing so he joins a pantheon of past H&M co-creators that includes Versace, Balmain, Moschino, Comme des Garçons, and Maison Margiela – where Martens has just presented his debut ready-to-wear show as creative director. “And it all started with Karl Lagerfeld,” says Martens of the company’s first-ever collaboration collection back in 2004: “Of course I’m very happy to be part of a story that started with him.”
But back to that all-important underwear: because embroidered on the waistband (in all-caps) is Martens’s name. “I’m going to have to order so, so many to give as Christmas presents,” he says. Pressed for details of the style, Martens declines to show more of his pair, but says they are an adaptation of H&M’s best-selling boxer-brief. And is there any other decoration? “A little tramp stamp on the back!” he pitches. Next to him, Ann-Sofie Johansson rocks in laughter (while ruefully shaking her head): “He tried, he really tried!”
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Johansson is an H&M lifer: its head of design and its long serving chief creative advisor. Part of her gig is to help H&M select its fashion design partners and then execute their co-creations. “We admired Glenn’s work at Y/Project for a long time,” she says, referring to the label at which Martens developed his style for 11 years as creative director until its closure last year. “I think we saw something from Glenn that was very special that you hadn’t seen before: it was fresh and young and innovative and kind of crazy – weird in a good way – and at the same time really beautiful. You could see the craft in it and the thought behind it.” Via Pascal Conte-Jodra, the Y/Project CEO who had previously worked alongside Johansson on an H&M collaboration when he was leading Mugler, a conversation began in 2023.
Meanwhile, stuff happened: Y/Project hit the skids following the death of its co-founder Gilles Elalouf, prompting the exit of Martens and the brand’s shuttering. This gave Renzo Rosso at OTB a window to woo Martens to add Maison Margiela to his existing duties at Diesel.
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Says Martens: “In a way this collection really started, and really took off, when I left Y/Project. This collection is Glenn Martens for H&M. But it gave me the chance to go back to all my drawings and all my designs from that time instead of putting it in a box and forgetting about it. And that design was really about celebrating quirky individuality, and youth, but most youngsters can’t afford design pieces, so what a swan song to be able to go back to these ideas but with the power of H&M’s democracy and price point.”
Most youngsters can’t afford design pieces, so what a swan song to be able to go back to these ideas but with the power of H&M’s democracy and price point.
Glenn Martens
Together, Martens and Johansson have shaped a unique approach to this collaboration, one which applies his lens to established H&M favorites. Hence the Martens namecheck on the brand’s bestselling boxer brief. “I’m very experimental. And I have this whole twisting game: to project something different on the recognizable. So the starting point here was to project this twist on H&M bestsellers. And at H&M the bestseller is like everywhere, very black and white and gray. And we wanted some color, too. So we ended up pushing it further and applying the twist to other universal archetypes of wearability: which is how we ended up in Britain.”
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
The rails reveal a delirious fever dream of stereotypical style anglais in which Martens’s Y/Project-vintage experiments in form and fabric provide the hallucinogenic substance. There are check country shirts, bags, and trench coats in his past-signature metal foil construction that allow the wearer to mold the garments into crazily disrupted contortions. “The production process was super-difficult,” sighs Johansson. Over-dyed preppy cable-knit sweaters are wrenched open around the neckline and garment dyed into a depth far more swirling than their typical primary-color iteration. Frayed hem jersey pieces, janty-silhouette two-tone denim jeans, whiskered denim jackets, overprinted trompe-l’œil argyle and tartan skirts and dresses, thigh-high denim boots, preppy cotton shirts with articulating collars, ironically tinny regal jewelry, and jersey printed with the silhouette of a magnificently-turreted castle are further entertainingly twisted highlights on the hangers. Says Martens: “The idea was to take archetypes everyone knows and give them the freedom to misbehave.”
Which brings us to the campaign, which will be everywhere by the time this collection launches on October 30. Shot in London, it stars Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant as the matriarch and patriarch of an anarchic/parodic multiverse reflection of a royal family. Notes the designer: “That’s because every piece in the collection could belong to one big, eccentric family, maybe a bit deranged, but somehow also very united.” It might channel the British royals, but this collection’s true king and queen are Martens and Johansson.
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M
Photo: Courtesy of H&M