Fall / Winter 2025 – 2026 Haute Couture Maison Margiela show in Paris review by mavEric

At Margiela, one does not present a collection — one delivers a ritual. And Glenn Martens, for his first artisanal haute couture, did not betray the cult — he transcended it.

For his first couture FW 2025/26 show, he could have done Martin. He chose instead to do Glenn — with Martin in his veins. The plastic wrap as a second skin, the draped silhouettes like liquid sculptures, the faces masked not to conceal but to sublimate anonymity as an act of resistance in an age of compulsive selfies. Here, the invisible is no longer erasure — it is a declaration of dignity.

The house codes are here, very much alive: trompe-l’œil, the subversion of materials, garments as archaeological archives. Each silhouette is a a technical conundrum: plastic thermoformed like armor from the future, taffeta aged to the point of abstraction, embroideries saturated to the edge of baroque yet never tipping into gratuitous excess. Nothing is there merely to look pretty — everything is there to tell, to unsettle, to sublimate. And that is where couture becomes dangerously relevant.

Each look is a shard of memory that Martens reactivates without ever locking it in time.

This is not nostalgia. It is a rereading. A tribute without reverence, a freedom with awareness. He restores to the Margiela gesture its original political charge: seeing clothing not as ornament, but as a critical medium. One feels the craftsmanship, yes — but above all, the intelligence.

The intelligence of the fragment, of the recycled, of vulnerability made beautiful.

In the masked faces, in the embroideries accumulated like social narratives, in these bodies covered, camouflaged, held at a distance — everything reminds us that elegance sometimes begins with the right to opacity.

Text by mavERIC