How Did No One See Margiela's New Creative Director Coming?
Glenn Martens is Maison Margiela's new creative director. And the most surprising thing about it is that seemingly no one saw it coming.
Margiela's parent company, OTB, announced Martens' new appointment early on January 29 in a brief statement, confirming Martens' immediate takeover of the house that Martin built while offering a couple quotes from key execs.
“After Martin, who gave life to the Maison and its unique Artisanal line, and John who made it the most cutting-edge couture house in the world, I am proud to have a third couturier at its helm," OTB Group chairman Renzo Rosso said.
“Maison Margiela is at a key moment of its history and on well-defined and solid tracks," Margiela chairman Stefano Rosso added.
Martens, meanwhile, simply said that he felt "extremely honored" to lead "the amazing Maison Margiela" and thanked Rosso "for the trust" reflected in Martens' new role.
This last part is particularly salient. It's indicative of the bond between Martens and Rosso, in turn reflecting an interesting development in the business of fashion creative director rumors.
There've been rumors about creative director reshufflings for as long as there've been creative directors but, over the past few years, fashion industry gossip has exploded. Over the past month alone, a near-constant deluge of increasingly wild whispers took over the digital discourse. The Proenza Schouler boys to LOEWE! Jonathon Anderson to Dior! The Meiers to something else!
In fairness, the spate of rumors speak to the industry's inclination for occasional flurries of professional reshuffling. Consider the host of switcheroos unleashed rapid-fire in late 2024, when Hedi Slimane's departed from CELINE, John Galliano exited Margiela, and Chanel finally filled its vacancy.
Nearly all of these creative director hirings and retirings were initially discussed in the context of exhaustive rumor-monging spun across Instagram, Twitter, and, rarely, LinkedIn, creating a hyperbolic news cycle fueled by anonymous sources, finger-pointing, and all-caps confidence.
Plenty of the rurumorwere on-point though several, well, we'll see. And yet, amidst all the generalized rumblings of John Galliano heading to Dior and Hedi Slimane to Gucci, no one called Glenn Martens taking over Maison Margiela. Crazy!
Hindsight is 20/20, sure, but it all seems so obvious now: Martens remained the creative lead of Diesel even after leaving the embattled Y/Project and, like Margiela, Diesel is owned by OTB. Martens is also publicly chummy with Rosso, having offered nothing but praise for his boss since joining Diesel in late 2020.
Further, Martens' inimitable whimsy is a natural fit for Margiela, with many elements of the house's style present in his ouevre. There's the tangible stuff — a fascination with denim, football references, sculptural silhouettes, unexpected upcycling, John Paul Gaultier cosigns — but also looser throughlines, like a canniness for balancing avant ingenuity with commercial concerns.
It all makes so much sense! Maybe too much sense, going off of how it seemingly slipped past all the usual rumor mills.
