Glenn Martens continues to challenge the conventions of contemporary fashion with his latest collaboration, H&M Glenn Martens, launching on October 30, 2025. Known for his disruptive and conceptual design language, Martens injects irony and refinement into every piece. The collection revisits H&M’s archives while reworking his own signatures into fresh forms, producing a study of transformation, play, and personality.
Martens, recognized for his tenure at Y/Project and Diesel, approaches each collaboration as an experiment in form and identity. At Y/Project, he reshaped avant-garde design into something grounded yet unpredictable, while at Diesel he expanded the idea of denim into a contemporary cultural symbol. His work consistently turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, refusing to separate intellect from emotion.
The H&M Glenn Martens collection transforms familiar archetypes into mutable objects. Manipulated denim, braided knits, and printed dresses appear alongside wired outerwear and deconstructed trench coats. Each piece encourages tactile engagement; its shape can be adjusted, reconstructed, or entirely reinvented. Martens incorporates a distinctly British influence, from Highland tartans and soft tweeds to boiled wool and structured trenches. “I tried to get an aristocratic, British vibe into the collection based on shapes, fabrics and archetypes,” he says. “From afar you might say 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.”
The campaign extends the play between heritage and absurdity. Martens envisioned the cast as a surreal fashion family, a nod to nineteenth-century royal portraits reimagined through humor. Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant embody the matriarch and patriarch of this imagined household, while Clym Evernden, Audrey Marnay, Jum Kuochnin, Heather Diamond Strongarm, and Clara Denison complete the ensemble as the “teenagers.”
For Martens, garments act like personalities in constant evolution. “I see the collection as a big family of garments,” he explains. “They all have different personalities at different times – formal, informal, loud, quiet, rule-breaking, classic – and can be styled and interpreted in different ways.”
