What’s Next for Glenn Martens and Y/Project?

The facts: last Friday, designer Glenn Martens announced that he was leaving Y/Project, the brand where he had been working since 2013. Several months ago, owner and co-founder Gilles Elalouf, passed away, leaving his parts in the business to his brother.

Last season, the brand cancelled its Paris Fashion Week show at the last minute (officially to “focus on internal investments”; the collection was ultimately unveiled in a lookbook featuring friends and family as models), and it will not show this month, either. It joins Ludovic de Saint Sernin, who has also pulled out of the PFW calendar, unexpectedly, and brands including Lanvin, Givenchy and Tom Ford, who are prepping their new artistic directors for next season. What will happen to Y/Project, remains to be seen.

Martens, meanwhile, continues to lead Italian jeanswear brand Diesel, where he’s been creative director since October 2020, with a show in Milan on the afternoon of September 21st. He is also fully expected to land a major design job, most likely at a luxury house, at some point in the near or far future.

“THE PERSON MAKES THE CLOTHES, NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND”

Y/Project was launched as a brooding, post-goth men’s label in 2010, by designer Yohan Serfaty (hence the Y in Y/Project).

After Serfaty tragically passed away in 2013, Martens took over, slowly implementing his own voice and vision, and expanding into womenswear, which soon became a bigger part of the business. Y/Project soon became hugely influential and commercially successful, and its shows were among the most anticipated on the Paris Fashion Week calendar. Martens was awarded the ANDAM prize in 2017.

The Belgian designer, originally from Bruges, had studied at Antwerp’s Royal Academy and, like Martin Margiela before him, launched his Paris career at Jean Paul Gaultier. He consulted for brands like Weekday and Boss, and had his own, eponymous line for all of 3 seasons before taking on the Y/Project job.

“I think it's important that our clothes project personality and individualism,” Martens said in January 2019, when Y/Project showed at Pitti in Florence. “The idea is that the person makes the clothes, and not vice versa. In essence, everything is designed to be worn by both men and women. And they can look both very masculine and very feminine. We don't want to create an army of all the same people.”

“We are a conceptual label,” he continued. “Even our simplest t-shirt has a conceptual twist. We don't make simple blazers or pants. Streetwear has a place in fashion. But what I don't understand are sweaters with a logo that cost 800 euros. To me, that's not luxury, and it's not what I want to do. I think you have to take your customers seriously.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

What’s next for Glenn Martens? For now, he’s still the creative director of Italian jeanswear brand Diesel, which under his leadership has become relevant again, after many years in the fashion doldrums. He has redesigned stores, opened the Milan Fashion Week shows to the public on an unprecedented level, and has taken the fragrance business, licensed to L’Oréal, into a new, more diverse direction.

The fashion landscape is being thoroughly reshuffled these days, and although both Tom Ford and Givenchynominated new designers within the last seven days, there are still vacancies aplenty, at brands including Dries Van Noten and Chanel.

Will Martens go to Maison Margiela, where John Galliano is said to be departing? The rumours are persistent. And yes, Martens and Margiela are both Belgian, and their names start with the same three letters. Maison Margiela is owned by OTB, which is Renzo Rosso’s group, and he’s also the businessman behind Diesel. Martens, like Margiela before him, is a particularly influential avant-garde designer, with a vision that has penetrated the mainstream. But then again, the top job at Margiela could be a poisoned gift. Galliano has acted like a wolf in sheep's clothing, pushing Margiela's legacy completely aside to focus on his own thing, and reducing Margiela to a logo (the four stitches), tabi shoes, and white lab coats for the staff. And then there’s Demna, who has been extremely successful, first at Vetementsand then at Balenciaga, with a style, and a vision, that brought some of Margiela’s ideas to the 21st Century. Relaunching Margiela, in the current fashion climate, will be arduous.

“Margiela is a way of thinking,” Martens reflected all those years ago in Florence. “I belong to a generation that has grown up with Margiela, so it’s normal that we refer to his work. There is a connection, which doesn’t mean that we just copy/paste what he has done.”

Martens is a stellar designer; he is certainly up to the task of handling Margiela — but does he really want to?

Courtesy: Y/Project official website 

Text: Jesse Brouns