Glenn Martens, the Diesel Designer, Named Creative Director at Maison Margiela

At least one of the fashion industry’s great open questions has been answered.

On Wednesday morning, hours after the men’s fall fashion shows concluded in Paris, the Belgian designer Glenn Martens was named creative director of Maison Margiela, replacing John Galliano, the illustrious couturier who bowed out of the brand in December.

Mr. Martens is far from a fresh face at Only the Brave Group, the corporation that has owned the Margiela label since 2002. In 2020, Mr. Martens was named creative director at Diesel, the specialty denim label that the OTB founder Renzo Rosso established in 1978.

Mr. Martens will remain in that position, becoming the rare designer doing double duty as the creative director at two separate companies.

“I have worked with Glenn for years, I have witnessed his talent, and I know what he is capable of,” Mr. Rosso said in a news release, which noted that Mr. Martens will begin at Margiela immediately, though it is unclear when he will stage his first runway show.

“I feel extremely honored to join the amazing Maison Margiela, a truly unique house that has been inspiring the world for decades,” Mr. Martens said in the release.

The designer, 41, erupted onto the scene in the mid-aughts as the designer of Y/Project, a cultish French label. There, Mr. Martens proved to be a deft hand at reimagining fixed notions of form — and perhaps, good taste. He created pants that dipped at the top, forming a Y shape that flashed the upper groin; jackets affixed with too many sleeves; and ginormous denim boots that pooled like the wavy lines of a static-y television. When Mr. Martens designed a pair of denim panties that looked like a light blue diaper, he showed that he was a maestro of minting viral moments. Under Mr. Martens’s tutelage, Y/Project won the ANDAM fashion prize in 2017 and 2020.

That attention helped Mr. Martens hop to Diesel. Five years ago, Diesel wasn’t quite setting the fashion world on fire. Many in the industry brushed it off as a behind-the-times rock ’n’ roll jeans label. Once at the brand, though, Mr. Martens demonstrated that he is a Michaelangelo of denim, triggering a wave of new shoppers and glowing press.

He made twisted jeans, jeans printed with trompe l’oeil fake outs and jeans that were nearly translucent. He specialized in washes, trotting out jeans in inky black, dusty gray and desert tan. He spliced jeans until they were as porous as cheesecloth and shaped them into the shaggy texture of a komondor.

He notched commercial wins with logoed handbags, leather jackets and belt buckles, channeling a Y2K style that was catnip to millennial and Gen-Z shoppers. Mr. Martens had a democratic touch at Diesel: One of his runway shows was staged in front of about 5,000 guests, including some 2,000 members of the public. Far from a fashion-world snob, Mr. Martens also knew how to wink at his audience, as when Diesel collaborated with the condom maker Durex.

Mr. Martens left Y/Project last year, and the label foundered without him. It shuttered in January.

Mr. Martens couldn’t have larger shoes to fill at Margiela. Mr. Galliano was a veteran of Dior and Givenchy, and, despite a controversial past, he remains a consensus genius in the fashion world. He spun Margiela, a brand staked on a distilled minimalism under its founder Martin Margiela, into something decidedly more fanciful. Mr. Galliano’s Artisanal couture shows were a callback to fashion’s more intimate yet theatrical ’80s and ’90s. On the runway, he played with bodily manipulation, draped textiles as if they were cotton candy fluff and brought his particular brand of baroque elegance back to the fashion stage.

It would be a safe bet that Mr. Martens will steer Margiela in a more grounded direction. Unlike Mr. Galliano, who turned away from the fashion press, Mr. Martens is a game interview subject. He is known to dress in a studiously humble uniform: jeans, dark sweaters, ball caps. He is also, of course, a wizard of that most egalitarian fabric, denim.

Mr. Martens shares much with Mr. Margiela. Two Belgians, they each graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and began their careers working for Jean Paul Gaultier.