Maison Margiela SS27: How Quiet Can Weirdness Get?

A dried flower sealed inside a transparent box arrived as the invitation. Inside Paris’s Élysée Montmartre, flowers appeared again, fresh, wilting, preserved and decaying across the room.

After seasons of broken porcelain, wax-drenched antique dresses, masks and clothing pushed towards physical collapse, Glenn Martens has lowered the volume. Maison Margiela SS27 is quieter, though quiet under Martens hardly means normal. It means discovering how little needs to change before a familiar garment starts acting strangely.

Hard Meets Soft

The season begins with one of fashion’s oldest divisions of labour. Traditional Paris ateliers distinguish tailleur, responsible for structured tailoring, from flou, where softer dressmaking and draping take place. Martens collapses the boundary.

He calls the premise HARD and SOFT.

Rigid interfacing moves onto fluid clothes. Draping meets architectural support. Jackets gain sharp internal interruptions while soft jersey is given the posture of tailoring. Martens described the project as an attempt to place a strong conceptual idea inside every garment without making the result intimidating to wear.

The approach immediately changes the scale of experimentation.

A trench hardly needs to become an unrecognisable sculpture. Moving its structure, revealing something normally hidden or folding its lapel inward can produce enough friction. Some jackets even allow those concertina-like lapels to be returned to a more conventional position, leaving the wearer to decide how visibly Margiela the garment becomes.

Trench coats, shirts, T-shirts, tailored jackets and long skirts form much of the vocabulary. The silhouettes are considerably calmer than the physical drama at Maison Margiela FW26 Martens presented in Shanghai only six months earlier, where porcelain shattered against the floor, 19th-century dresses hardened under beeswax and draping surged around the body like architecture in motion.

Classic tailoring folds inward across the chest. Firm panels project from otherwise soft garments. Column skirts in 1960s-style floral brocade are secured with familiar Margiela cotton tape. Linings migrate from private interior to visible surface. Open necklines become exaggerated enough to suggest nudity, only for flesh-colored panels underneath to reveal the trick.

This is also where Martens comes closest to the early intellectual pleasure of Maison Margiela: fashion produced through a changed instruction. Turn it inside out. Move the seam. expose the lining. Wear the unfinished component. Let the normal garment remain visible underneath the intervention.

SS27 seems fascinated by how much disruption a basic wardrobe can absorb while still functioning as one.

The Body Is Naked Until It Isn’t

Maison Margiela has always enjoyed deceiving the eye, and some of SS27’s sexiest moments are essentially lies.

Flesh-toned inserts sit behind apparently plunging shirts, trenches and jackets, extending the visual impression of bare skin beyond the amount actually exposed. Netting and transparency complicate the illusion further. From the runway, body and garment can temporarily become difficult to separate. It is a sharper proposition than simple naked dressing.

Martens creates nudity through construction, allowing cloth to impersonate flesh. A body can look exposed while remaining technically covered. The trick fits the wider HARD/SOFT premise too: vulnerability becomes engineered.

The styling preserves that slight wrongness. Conventional wardrobe pieces coexist with unexpected sneakers, manipulated proportions and beauty that shifts between near-erasure and aggressively painted faces. On some models, pigment travels beyond the facial boundary and into the hair roots.

Before the runway, the house circulated imagery involving a crushed silver teapot, flowers in different stages of decay and objects caught or preserved. Guests received dried flowers trapped inside transparent cases. Inside the venue, Mark Colle’s floral environment continued the question of what survives once a living object begins to change.

Its resemblance to Raf Simons’s flower-filled Fall 2012 Dior couture debut was difficult to miss. Here, the reference carries particular resonance: Belgian fashion history echoing inside a house founded by another Belgian who permanently disrupted Paris. Contemporary coverage also identified the connection directly.

Soft Lace Gets Trapped in Plastic, Silverware Becomes Eveningwear

Red lace is laminated in vinyl and inserted against pink satin, enclosing something intimate and delicate within a harder synthetic skin. HARD and SOFT suddenly become physical rather than theoretical.

Elsewhere, crushed silverware forms part of an evening gown. Household objects migrate into formal dress, continuing a Margiela tradition of allowing things outside fashion’s normal material hierarchy to acquire value through construction.

The silverware piece will inevitably become one of the collection’s immediate images, though the quieter tailoring ultimately carries more significance.

A dress covered with flattened metal announces its disruption instantly. An ordinary jacket whose architecture has subtly migrated takes longer to decode. Martens is strongest this season when discovery happens late.

The same distinction exposes the weaker experiments. Some airbrushed jersey effects communicate their intervention immediately and stop there. When Margiela’s weirdness becomes a visible surface treatment, the joke can end at first sight. When weirdness sits inside the engineering, the garment keeps unfolding.

For this house, strange construction usually lasts longer than a strange finish.

Maison Margiela Has Calmed Down at Exactly the Right Moment

Only days earlier, Martens had presented his final Diesel SS27 show after six years at the label. His tenure officially ended with the designer leaving to concentrate fully on Maison Margiela, bringing an unusually demanding period of simultaneous creative directorships to a close.

No need to prove how spectacularly Martens can mutate an object. SS27 seems almost to exhale. The calmness may be the most revealing development of his tenure so far.

That restraint risks reading as commercial at first glance, yet SS27 is far from sterile. The collection still carries plenty of wrongness, distortion and visual friction; it simply delivers them with a steadier hand. The more interesting shift is how little force Martens now needs to make a garment feel unmistakably Margiela.

He has already proved he can make the house enormous, theatrical and borderline destructive. SS27 asks a harder question: can the same intelligence survive at the scale of a jacket, a T-shirt or a trench coat?

The answer starts to look convincing when the garment stays familiar enough to wear, yet strange enough to resist becoming ordinary.

Martin Margiela made ordinary clothing intellectually unstable. Glenn Martens does not need every season to resemble an archaeological disaster to inherit that instinct. With his attention finally concentrated on one house, the next phase of Maison Margiela may depend on restraint: knowing exactly which rule to break, then resisting the temptation to break five more. SS27 is quieter because Martens can afford to be.