When Glenn Martens became the creative director of Paris-based fashion house Maison Margiela in January 2025, he expected never to show his face again.
After all, the founder of the brand, Martin Margiela, has rarely been seen. Ever. Anonymity was key to the Belgian’s conception of making clothes: rather than big, corporate, and pop, he saw fashion as small, artisanal, elusive. He covered models’ faces with masks and dressed his workers in white lab coats. In a famous portrait from 2001, captured by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue, the entire staff pose cross-armed in their little white coats, with a chair left empty in the front row for the designer.
Those who took on the label after Margiela’s 2009…