Can a cult fashion brand appeal to the whole world?

By Rachel Tashjian, CNN

(CNN) — 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 retirement have largely followed suit: Matthieu Blazy (the man now heading up fashion’s biggest and splashiest name, Chanel) was not publicly recognized as Margiela’s creative lead until journalist Suzy Menkes “outed” him in 2014. More recently, the controversial designer John Galliano used the house’s reticence as a refuge to rebuild his reputation after a series of antisemitic rants led to his ouster from French fashion monolith Dior in 2011.

But on a beautiful Paris afternoon in March, Martens found himself reluctantly in front of the camera, maskless but white-jacketed in his freshly all-white office — a nod to what the brand calls Bianchetto, or covering clothes, accessories and other surfaces in white so that the wear and tear of life becomes a kind of beauty mark, rather than a flaw.

He was facing the camera to talk about how you make a brand whose reputation was built on speaking to a small audience of clothing connoisseurs, feel relevant all over the world. And to start, he is decamping from fashion’s traditional capital, Paris, and taking Margiela to China, where he’ll stage a massive show on April 1, followed by weeks of programming, free and open to the public, that will bring the ethos of Margiela to the masses.

“Look at me, I’m supposed to be there [off camera] — hidden,” he said, smiling. “I always said to her” — here, he gestured to Margiela’s chief marketing officer, sitting nearby — “from the beginning, I’m not going to be the spokesperson of the brand. Look at me, one year later: BAM!”

Martens, a 42-year-old (and a Belgian, like Margiela himself), lives in a different era than even his well-known predecessors did just a few years ago. There is no avant-garde fashion to speak of, really; every brand, from the logo-driven mega labels to art house darlings, has to put celebrities in their clothes. Everyone has to deal with social media; even if your clothes are designed for the few, you have to know that everyone in the world can see them — and offer their feedback, good or bad. Martens knows this: at the denim brand Diesel, where he is also creative director, and prior to that, at the defunct spunky-punky brand Y/Project, he has made an art out of making strange ideas like twisted hems and corseted bodices feel like the foundations for great TikTok theses.

But Martens doesn’t want to make “one hit wonders,” as he calls social media catnip clothes that have a flash of viral controversy, then disappear. He wants Margiela to stand for a less obvious kind of beauty, refinement, and that most loaded word of all, luxury.

Luxury is synonymous now with first class airport lounges and overpriced, hard-to-get handbags. For Martens, it is about pushing for another way of thinking and creating: “It’s all about repurposing, working in a different way, trying to find something alternative to the industry,” like a fabric found in a thrift shop rather than an exclusive French mill, or a dress scaled up to human size from a junk shop porcelain doll. “But still working on it so intensively that actually the value becomes couture.”

So how do you make a cult brand feel like a global enterprise?

Remember that Paris is not the only city for fashion

“Maison Margiela has always been quite introspective and introverted,” Martens said. He wants the brand to talk to “everybody, and not just [focus] on our niche way of thinking.”

Even if you can’t afford Margiela, looking, learning and thinking about it is free — a theory embodied by the programming in China, which will take place in multiple cities across multiple weeks and which is, as Martens said, “free and open to the public.” He’s showing his Fall 2026 couture (or in the house’s parlance, Artisanal) and ready-to-wear clothes in Shanghai on Wednesday, alongside a presentation in the middle of the city’s streets of Artisanal looks from across two decades of Margiela history; an exhibition of some of the world’s most rabid Tabi collectors in Chengdu; an opportunity for the public to bring a garment and give it a DIY Bianchetto treatment in Shenzhen; and an exploration of the brand’s masks in Beijing. The undertaking was announced in a new project called Maison Margiela/folders, which makes all the imagery and research typically accessible only by press and employees, available to all.

Why China? The country, with its fashion-savvy consumers, has become a lodestar for the industry. Since 2019, Maison Margiela has opened 26 stores there, and Martens wanted to better connect with the brand’s fans there. “When you go and meet people, you create stronger bonds. That’s why we decided to cancel the fashion weeks in Paris,” he said. “It’s as relevant and important to be there.”

Mind your own beeswax (dress)

“We’re not really engaging in couture in a classic way,” Martens explained, standing in front of a recreation of an Edwardian dress inspired by the ensembles worn by that era’s porcelain dolls. He and his team made the dresses proportionate to a modern (non-doll) wearer, and then, in a nod to China’s long history of using beeswax in candles and even cosmetics, dipped the entire garment in beeswax to give it a ghostly aura. It’s the kind of piece that’s made to order, likely for just a client or two, and not couture in the traditional French sense, but extraordinarily special on Margiela’s own terms.

Get a therapy dog — and give him a little uniform

“When a creative director arrives in a new house, everybody gets very stressed because they have no idea what to expect,” said Martens. “I really came into this company where it was a bit like on edge. And two weeks later, I got a dog” — Murphy — “which changed the whole atmosphere. Suddenly, everybody was the cutest — super happy. So he’s the official therapy dog of Maison Margiela.”

Keep up with the Kardashians

Dressing celebrities is essential to any fashion house’s survival; the right famous person in your outfit can mean millions in revenue and boosted name recognition.

But for a label whose values run counter to the very notion of celebrity — a barely photographed founder; a refusal to pay people to wear its clothes — Martens’s mandate is a tricky one.

Instead, he sees Margiela as a moment for celebrities to transform themselves. He references Kim Kardashian, who was one of the first to wear his couture designs: “She’s of course a very public person; Margiela is very intimate,” he said. But, “when she plays the game of wearing Margiela, she becomes Margiela.”

Don’t design safe stuff, even if you know the trolls will come for you

Martens is more fluent in the ways of social media than many designers working today: he firmly believes in letting everyone in, yet also knows that doing so risks the criticism and, increasingly, vitriol of online commenters. Mouthpieces resembling Margiela’s white four-stitch logo, which were affixed on models in Martens’s ready-to-wear show last fall, were criticized for their dehumanizing effect.

“You’re gonna get slaps from different sides,” Martens said. “What we have to do now — what I have to do now, and I hope my colleagues in other houses do now — is try to just stay cool and just focus on what they do and why they do it and not listen too much to all the buzz around it. Because I think that’s exactly what maybe happens today in fashion: things get a bit gray because we are trying to be safe, because we know that people scream loud.”

Martens plans to scream, if not louder, than with more originality.

Video by Mark Esplin and Phil Clarke Hill.

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