Disruptive, curious and ironic, Glenn Martens is one of the most genuine and creative designers in contemporary fashion, with an experimental aesthetic that bridges irreverence and refinement. As creative director of Y/Project, he transformed the once-niche label into a globally relevant reference for avant-garde yet wearable design. At Diesel, Martens has redefined what a denim powerhouse can represent in contemporary culture, collapsing the boundaries between luxury, art and everyday essentials. This year, he was tapped to lead Maison Margiela, one of fashion’s most conceptually daring houses.

His work fuses playfulness with precision, fluidity with structure, and eccentricity with elegance, embracing contradictions as a source of strength. Martens’ design philosophy is rooted in transformation and multiplicity: His garments are constantly in flux, encouraging interaction and resisting conventional constraints. In his atelier, fashion becomes both an intellectual pursuit and an emotional experience — somehow radical, romantic and ultramodern all at once.

The H&M Glenn Martens collection transforms bestsellers from the H&M archive and signature gestures from Martens’ own design history into new classics, taking shape as manipulated denim, braided and deconstructed knits, delicately printed dresses, wired outerwear, reengineered trench coats, theatrical jewellery, hip-high boots and shape-shifting bags, all infused with a bit of British heritage style: “I tried to get an aristocratic, British vibe into the collection based on shapes, fabrics and archetypes. We have the whole tartan family, and all the knitwear, which is very Scottish, very Highland. Then we worked with lots of very rich tweeds and wool fabrics. And we have the trench coats, the boiled wool coats — all very traditional in essence but with a Glenn Martens twist. The pieces are all foiled and wired, so you can actually reconstruct them. From afar you might say, ok this is a really classic tweed jacket. But once you have it in your hands, you can see that it is completely from a different world.”

This led into his campaign concept: “I wanted the campaign to portray an absurd group of people to reflect the fact that the collection archetypes are quite diverse. So the idea of a family portrait felt really fitting. Also, since the collection has a kind of Britishness to it, I felt it would be fun to put an eccentric spin on the kind of aristocratic or royal portrait you would see in the nineteenth century. The vibe of the British royal family is legendary, it's almost like a living fairytale. It really brings you into a different world, and I wanted the campaign to exist in parallel to that world.”

British icons Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant stepped into the roles of matriarch and patriarch of an imagined Glenn Martens fashion family, supported by a diverse ensemble cast to play the “teenagers”, including models Clym Evernden, Audrey Marnay, Jum Kuochnin, Heather Diamond Strongarm and Clara Denison.

“I see the collection as a big family of garments,” Martens explained, “all of which have multiple purposes and multiple starting points. They all have different personalities at different times — formal, informal, loud, quiet, rule-breaking, classic — and can be styled and interpreted in different ways. Just like people, they are themselves, but they are also always changing and growing and feeling different each day.”

H&M Glenn Martens will be available in selected stores and at hm.com on 30 October 2025.