The first great fashion designer of 2022
It was the first big show of Milan Fashion Week: 1 p.m. on Day 1.
Every chair in the cavernous warehouse space, which was arrayed with giant inflatable denim-bedecked bombshells and grease monkeys, was full. Some attendees seemed to have come straight from the airport. Tim Blanks, the critic of Business of Fashion, was at the show for the “first time in years.” Ditto editor and curator Stefano Tonchi. Julia Fox, the celebrity magnet of the moment, was front row. Renzo Rosso, mogul, owner of Only the Brave, one of the few Italian conglomerates, was presiding, a giant smile on his face.
All there to see the new Diesel collection.
Wait … Diesel? The rock ‘n’ roll jeans brand?
Diesel, the onetime rock ‘n’ roll jeans brand now designed by Glenn Martens.
It was the third leg of a trifecta of shows by Martens since the start of the year that together have catapulted him from niche conceptualist, beloved of high-minded industry insiders, fashion freaks and art school students, to the status of first great designer of 2022.
On Jan. 19, there was a joint men’s and women’s show for Y/Project, the cult French brand he took over in 2013, featuring net tank tops and skirts and trousers silk-screened with male and female torsos and groins matched up seemingly randomly, in a not-so-random commentary on the wider conversation around gender and identity.
The following week came his first-ever couture collection as the guest designer for Jean Paul Gaultier, complete with ballgowns so voluminous
they resembled frothing seas and mermaid dresses made from shredded strips of silk ribbon, like a never-ending corset. Then, three weeks after that, came Diesel, with its 1,000 forms of denim: tufted, frayed, collaged, chromed, recycled, reinvented.
Martens is not the first designer to try his hands at multiple brands simultaneously (currently Jonathan Anderson with JW Anderson and Loewe and Raf Simons with his own brand and Prada are among those doing double duty), but he may be the first to embrace such seemingly disparate houses to equal acclaim.
Watching the Diesel show “brought me to tears,” Rosso said afterward. “His treatment of denim is something we’ve never seen before.”
He is, Tonchi said, “not afraid of anything.”
When Martens was named president of the fashion jury for the 37th edition of the Hyères
International Festival of Fashion and Photography, the Cannes Film Festival of fashion prizes, his metamorphosis from genius weirdo into industry Olympian seemed complete. But now that everyone is finally watching, what does he do next?
Too weird, too much
“We never preached that we’re going to make beautiful silhouettes,” Martens, 38, said a few weeks before the Diesel show. “A lot of what we do is for the sake of pushing limits, and a lot of people in the past were like, ‘Why?’ ” He was talking about Y/Project and Zooming in via video from his Y/Project office in Paris.
He was wearing his usual uniform: an old black sweater he had bought from an outlet in London, black denim jeans and a faded baseball cap. He had two chains around his neck, a hoop earring in his ear and two rings on his fingers, and he was half
shaven.
Y/Project, he said, “existed for so many years to do this experimental design and quirky things and nobody cared. It was too weird, it was all too much. They were having a stroke after the third look.” Even the staff, he said, often had “a moment in a fitting when we’re looking at our design and thinking, ‘Are we seriously going to do this?’ ”
You get the sense that when that question is asked is exactly when Martens thinks he is on the right track.
Started in 2010 by designer Yohan Serfaty, Y/ Project was initially known for its dark and moody menswear. When Serfaty died only three years after the label was introduced, his business partner, Gilles Elalouf, asked the Chambre Syndicale, the governing body of French fashion, who it would recommend to take over.
“I was the cheapest,”
Martens said.
When Y/Project came around, he closed his label, started the women’s line and ran it like a thought experiment. Each season begins with the design staff sitting around a table tossing out ideas and sketches for how they can mess with the way clothes are made. How they can play with multiple lapels on one garment so it looks like a few different jackets in one; slice jeans at the upper thigh and then reattach them so they resemble garter belts, or diapers; use wire to transform hems and lapels into endlessly fungible sculptures.
The results are smart and don’t look like anything else, and they’re often funny — the kind of garments that cause double takes and send High Fashion Twitter into a tizzy. But Y/Project is also the sort of brand with an influence inside fashion (and on other designers) that far outweighs its external sales. In 2020, for example, when Rihanna and Celine Dion had both appeared in the cutout pants, Y/ Project still had revenue somewhere between the single and double digit millions. All of which might normally make him an unexpected candidate for a mass-appeal brand like Diesel, which led its parent company, OTB, to post more than $1 billion in sales in 2021.
A fashion trojan horse
Nevertheless, Rosso, who had met Martens when Y/ Project won the Andam, the leading French fashion prize, in 2017, wasn’t the only big-brand mogul who saw potential in his rare combination of irreverent attitude and couture mind.
Martens said he was in discussion at different points to work with Donatella Versace at Versace and Kenzo. He also said he didn’t agree to the Diesel job until Rosso expanded it to include the entire creative side: clothing, licensing, marketing and store design.
He sees the brand as a sort of fashion Trojan horse that can seed sustainability. (He has been focused on responsible fashion since helping his former teacher Bruno Pieters start Honest By in 2012, a brand that was known for publishing all the sourcing information and price markups for every garment.) He has created the Diesel Library, which includes only evergreen styles made with environmentally responsible materials and treatments that come with QR codes on the label to explain the sourcing, as well as a program to use leftover scrap from the factories as store window installations.
And he said, “it’s quite nice to make garments you think are good, that make people feel good and comfortable and like they are going to nail life.”