Glenn Martens Split Margiela Into Hard and Soft, and Put It in Front of a Wall of Dried Flowers

Glenn Martens showed Maison Margiela's Spring/Summer 2027 collection in Paris on Tuesday, September 29, in a set built from flowers: a towering wall of dried ones behind a herringbone parquet runway. It came a week after he left Diesel at Milan Fashion Week, which leaves Margiela as his only house.

The idea is stated on Margiela's own show page, and it is a clean one. The collection is a study of HARD and SOFT, rooted in the way Parisian ateliers divide their work between Tailoring, which builds the structured garments, and Flou, which handles dressmaking and draping. The house says it took those couture practices and reappropriated them for ready-to-wear: hardness added to archetypal garments, and draping given new foundations to flow from.

Emirates Woman described the first look as a khaki-brown trench draped heavily at the front, and a bold floral brocade trench later with a matching lace collar. Denim and leather jackets ran through the show, along with full skirts and stiff, corset-like panels on tops and dresses. The closing looks were a series of black bodysuits and draped satin and jersey sheath dresses.

Maison Margiela

The flowers were not only scenery. The Impression noted that the house's Instagram posted videos in the run-up, among them a crushed silver teapot and a slowly decaying flower stem, and that the show invitation was a single dried flower in a plastic keepsake box. It read the season as being about preservation. The prints were loud by comparison: Emirates Woman saw metallic orange daisies, a pink floral skirt and a green jacket in one outfit, and an airbrushed swan on a gown.

Maison Margiela

Reviews split on how well it landed. The Impression liked the presentation and the craftsmanship, but said the airbrushed jersey dresses felt like gimmicks next to the more grounded floral prints and deconstructed tailoring. DSCENE was harder: its reviewer found herself more convinced by the proposition than by much of what it produced.

That is the useful read for the business. "Hard and soft" is a concept a customer can follow at a glance, and the trench and denim jackets are easy to sell. The risk the critics point at is the one every designer with a strong idea runs: when the argument is more interesting than the silhouette, the clothes end up illustrating it.