Glenn Martens's H&M Collaboration Is a Final Goodbye to Y/Project

H&M’s tradition of collaborating with high fashion designers dates back more than two decades, but Glenn Martens’s entry into that history is a little different. In September 2024, after 11 years at the helm, Glenn Martens stepped down from his role as creative director of Y/Project. After failing to find a buyer, the label shuttered just months later. Now, Martens’s offerings for H&M act as one final bow for the label that launched his career.

“I was like, ‘Maybe we should give a little swan song to Y/Project and give it an extra moment of celebration,’” Martens said in a press conference on October 7. “Instead of just putting it in the cupboard and having it die in the darkness.”

But when H&M’s creative advisor and head of womenswear, Ann-Sofie Johansson, initially reached out to Martens about the project, she had no idea the result would evolve into a finale of sorts for the beloved Parisian label. Initial conversations around the collaboration began two years ago, back before Martens departed Y/Project and added creative director of Maison Margiela to his resume.

The 42-year-old designer says Johansson and H&M are “so fucking lucky” things worked out the way they did. While the Belgian designer has many outlets for his creativity thanks to Diesel and Margiela, the subtraction of Y/Project from the equation meant he suddenly had ideas with no home. “Diesel is a denim brand and Margiela has quite a graphic heritage, but Y/Project was about constructive developments,” he explains to W over Zoom. “So when I was at H&M, I decided to put my brain into the form of constructive manipulations, which I would not do at, say, Diesel. It just doesn't make any sense for the brand.”

The starting point for the H&M collaboration was the retailer’s best sellers: trench coats, button-downs, and knitwear. From there, Martens added “some explosive twists.” Literally. The hallmark of the collection is an underlayer of foil that appears throughout—in the collar of the trench coat, in the body of a flannel, within the structure of a bag. The addition allows the wearer to manipulate the piece. The risk-averse can lay the shirts flat, while a more daring customer can scrunch up the shirt and make it a crop top, or play around with it throughout the day to achieve an evolving ensemble.

“We have so many personalities,” Martens says. “We are so many people in one day. We can be a mother, a businessman, and a slut at night. I think one wardrobe can sometimes answer those different moments of a day. So you can wear your oversized shirt to go shopping, but then in the evening you just twist it up and your belly comes out and you're ready for a party.”

The technique was not easy to achieve. “There were many tests and trials,” Johansson says. In fact, Martens admits he originally tried developing the technique at Y/Project, but they never aced it.

The foil was not the only Y/Project leftover getting reheated in the H&M collab. There is also a pair of boots one might recall from the now-defunct brand’s spring 2024 collection, with a piece of leather connected to the front with adjustable snaps. Like the foil technique, Y/Project was unable to bring the footwear into production, but H&M managed to get it done.

The boots can be seen alongside the rest of the collection in the collaborations campaign, which Martens calls a “stereotypical family portrait.” An illustrated backdrop of classic British scenery contrasts with scaffolding, a few corgis, and a whole lot of pigeons. Both Martens and Johansson feel that there are a lot of Britishisms in the collection, and they wanted to emphasize that with the campaign. Inspired by a 20th-century painting of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, Martens tapped British showbusiness royalty Richard E. Grant and Joanna Lumley as the stand-in king and queen. The rest of the cast, in their trompe l'oeil tartan skirts, distressed denim, and foil-filled tops, fill out this modern royal family. “King Charles and Queen Camilla weren’t available that day,” Johansson jokes.

The collection may not have the official royal seal of approval, but it most certainly has Martens’s rubber stamp. In fact, his name is on just about every piece, a first for the designer who has been working under brands for the entirety of his career. Now, you can even buy Glenn Martens-branded underwear. “I was like, ‘My God, there's going to be people wearing my name on their ass.’”

But Martens doesn’t really seem too upset about it. In fact, he’s honored. The designer is only the second person to do a collab with H&M under his own name, not a brand. The first was Karl Lagerfeld, who kicked off the entire project back in 2004. “My ego is exploding,” he says. “They’ve turned me into a monster.”

If he is a monster, he’s a monster Johansson clearly loves working alongside. The two have clear chemistry, laughing and cracking jokes while talking about the collection, of which both are obviously very proud. “It was really fun,” Martens says of the two-year process. “There was never a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I have to go to H&M.’”

For her part, Johansson is very forgiving of Martens, even when he tells a not-PR-appropriate story about his first experience with H&M back in his hometown of Bruges. “H&M was of course the biggest shit in Bruges when it came out,” he says. “It was like for the first time we actually had cool clothes for accessible price points. And they didn't know how to secure the clothes very well. So I was a beautiful 15-year-old shoplifter.”

Johansson takes it in stride, seemingly unconcerned that Martens-inspired thieves will hit the store upon the collaboration’s official launch on October 30. “Our security has increased.”