Having made his debut for Maison Margiela during couture week in July, Glenn Martens presented his first ready-to-wear collection for the storied avant-garde house yesterday. The show opened with 61 young musicians, all dressed in oversized, baggy tuxedos, taking their places in the orchestra. For those familiar with the house’s legendary early runways, the sight immediately evoked Martin Margiela’s Spring/Summer 1990 show, staged in an old playground in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. At that show, members of the fashion press shared their seats with local children, who eventually began running around and joining the models on the catwalk.

The children’s orchestra tuned up and began playing Richard Strauss’s iconic tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra. Almost instantly, the audience broke into smiles and laughter — not a single child was hitting the right note. The result was an atonal dirge, totally charming in its comic disarray. As the show notes later revealed, many of the young musicians were only a few months into their musical training. It was the kind of scene Martin Margiela himself might have dreamt up.

Even before the first look appeared, it was clear that Martens wanted to send a message that he understands the house he has taken over. He understands Margiela’s wit, his irreverence, and why his shows were unmissable in the late 80s and 90s. Where Galliano interpreted Margiela by making it wholly his own, Martens is choosing to move forward by looking back. He’s bringing Martin back to Margiela.

Then the first looks appeared and… oh, what’s this now? The models’ mouths looked as though they’d been stapled open. Wait, no, it was the four-stitch emblem. A flourish that was perhaps more unsettling than intended, the effect of the models’ mouths prised open was nonetheless effective in levelling the field. Martin Margiela famously concealed his models’ identities by wrapping their heads in fabric, forcing the audience to focus solely on the clothes. Martens’ gesture seemed to reference that spirit directly, rendering all his models equally strange and gesturing toward the anonymity that Maison Margiela has in its DNA.

Straight away, the first looks were far from Galliano’s Margiela. The long leather coats and low crotch trousers were distinctly 90s Margiela, matched with the deconstructed tailoring of the following jacket and waistcoat looks that is one of the house’s signatures. Many of the coats and jackets, be they leather or denim, had ribbons of fabrics hanging from them, which was a reference to the ties on the house’s famously anonymising white lab coats (the blouse blanche) that are worn by all staff. 

A number of pieces required a closer look to reveal their peculiarities, such as a slip dress that looks like it’s being cinched by a belt but it’s actually duct tape, another bit of tape is also keeping the lace together at its top. Trench coats, worn open, were cut with an excess of fabric, while certain jackets, when examined closely, revealed zips that could never actually close. Sheer lining covered whole looks, like a dust sheet, creating a ghostly effect where the garment beneath softly rendered through.

There were clear crossovers with Martens’s first Artisanal collection — a jacket that resembled a painted surface, its finish cracked and crumbling, and a top constructed from clusters of upcycled jewellery encased in plastic. Loud floral fabrics appeared throughout, some created from direct scans of real flowers which were directly printed onto the fabric. 

On foot, Martens didn’t focus too much on the house’s most popular creation, the Tabi. Instead he went into the archive to revive another one of the house’s footwear evolutions — the heel-less boot. Essentially, a boot where the gap of the heel has been filled in, creating a solid sole, it was reintroduced this season on pumps, western boots and long boots.