When I meet the Belgian designer Glenn Martens, we're riding through London on a double-decker bus. On the outside, his name is printed where a delivery start-up ad would usually be, alongside two letters denoting one of fashion's biggest stages: H&M.
The current creative director of both Maison Margiela and Diesel is adding the title of H&M collaborator—a coveted position whose alums range from Simone Rocha and Marni to Karl Lagerfeld and Jimmy Choo—to his already packed résumé. H&M x Glenn Martens is set to launch shortly after our chat. Out the windows of the bus, the streets are filled with locals in extra-baggy jeans and distressed bomber jackets, a look that's trickled down from Martens' own runways, particularly from his collections for Diesel and Y/Project, which he designed for over a decade before leaving last year. (The brand has since shut down.) In conversation with the retailer's top creative advisor, Ann-Sofie Johansson, though, he brushes off the assumption that anyone beyond true fashion insiders would walk into an H&M store on October 30 and immediately clock a runway celebrity.
"We are all very aware that 95% of the customers at H&M don't know me and don't know my products," Martens tells me as we're jostled through Trafalgar Square. It's hard to read his expression behind silver tinted sunglasses and his own bomber from the collab, but I get the sense that a lack of recognition doesn't phase him.
What he says he cares about are shoppers' reactions to the crunched-up bags and twisted button-downs that got this collection started two years ago: "[They] will really gag seeing these kind of...strange items, and they will be like, 'What the fuck is happening here?'"
This is the thing about Glenn Martens: Even shoppers who are only getting a formal introduction to him in 2025 have definitely seen his work for years. They just haven't realized it.
After cutting his teeth at Jean Paul Gaultier and briefly running a namesake label, Martens took over Y/Project in 2013. That move ushered in an era of clear-strap tank tops and twisted, warped jeans—which then reappeared in his open-to-the-public Diesel shows. Across every "crazy crazy" brand he's designed for, Martens' work has trickled into the mainstream: Celebrities who aren't afraid of a fashion adventure have flocked toward his larger-than-life proportions and dangerously low-rise jeans. Most denim trends of the past five years can be traced back to his runways.
While Martens' hip-high boots and shredded denim dresses might not seem suited for anywhere but a Charli xcx music video, he insists they're "wearable." He qualifies, however, the goal isn't look good in a traditional sense.
"What I mostly do is, I really try to push things and it's not about beauty," he says. "It's often about creativity and concept."
This renegade approach to fashion made Johansson all the more excited to take Martens from niche fashion circles to a bigger stage.
"We thought, if Glenn had to Glenn-ify or make our best sellers more special and more personal and more fashionable, how would he do it?" she asks.
H&M let him go for all his greatest hits: bags with witchy curved bases, trompe l'oeil plaid skirts, jeans that are only jeans for the span of an undergarment, before turning into leather pants. The philosophy, he says, is the same no matter where he's designing: "I think of the challenge of how to build clothes. How can we find twists or Glenn-ify something basic? It's a little funky, little twist projected on basics to make you think twice."
Martens' reputation as a provocateur makes itself known when I ask which piece in the H&M collection best reflects his impact as a designer. "I mean, all of them, really, because there's so many," he says. (People who over-apologize in the workplace could learn from his confidence.) "A lot of them have certain chapters of my past designer's life."
He pauses so we can take in the scope of his career, and the London landmarks the bus passes by, before answering in earnest. "I personally of course love this jacket," he adds, gesturing to his crinkled, oversize bomber that can be shaped by hand. "Otherwise, I wouldn't wear it today."
Martens is in rarified company with his H&M collaboration—Lagerfeld is the only other designer whose collection with the retailer was known by their name and not a brand's. "Of course, it's super fun that you have underwear with my name on it. It's quite amazing and it's kind of absurd," he shrugs, brushing off the phenomenon of mass-produced personalized underwear before it can seem too shiny. "Business-wise," he deadpans, "it's not really gonna help me."
Still, I take note of the passerby ogling our bus when it stops a few minutes later. They take pictures of the signs outside, getting an introduction to Martens in real time.
