When High Concept Meets High Street
What happens when one of fashion’s boldest experimenters crashes the H&M universe? You get Glenn Martens for H&M, a collaboration that rewires the rules of ready-to-wear into something witty, sculptural, and unapologetically fun.
Belgian designer Glenn Martens, best known for redefining silhouettes at Y/Project and Diesel, now brings his radical vision to the masses. This new partnership gives everyone access to his signature blend of trompe-l’œil illusion, tailored anarchy, and architectural volume, all without needing a couture budget.
The campaign stars British icons Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant, turning fashion into a playful social experiment. Think: aristocratic chaos, charm, and wink-wink glamour.
Twisting the Familiar Into the Fantastic
Martens calls this a “big family of garments”, and it shows. Each piece evolves, shifts, and transforms, embodying his obsession with fluid identity and design that moves with the body.
Expect foil-wired jackets that reshape like sculpture, optical-illusion jeans, and checked shirts reinvented as wearable art. It’s fashion as performance, the kind you live in, but never fade into.
The collaboration digs into H&M’s archive of best-sellers, from T-shirts to bombers, reworked into subversive Martens masterpieces. Each piece captures the tension between uniform and freedom, the everyday and the extraordinary.
The Campaign: British Humour Meets Couture Energy
Forget the stiff family portrait, this one winks back.
The campaign, shot with cinematic wit, features Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant as the eccentric matriarch and patriarch of a style-obsessed household. Around them, a diverse cast of fresh faces channel Martens’s fascination with individuality and British irony.
“It was great fun to be part of Glenn’s family portrait,” says Lumley. “The best fashion is rule-breaking, wear whatever you want.”
Grant agrees, calling the shoot “a riot” and “a stylish motley crew.”
The result? A campaign that doesn’t just sell clothes, it sells self-expression with a smirk.
A New Chapter in Fashion Democracy
H&M’s creative advisor Ann-Sofie Johansson calls it “one of the most creative collaborations we’ve ever done,” and she’s not exaggerating. The collection proves that innovation doesn’t belong solely to runways, it belongs to everyone brave enough to twist a classic.
Launching October 30, the collection bridges high fashion and the high street in true Martens style, clever, sculptural, and gloriously irreverent.
Fashion isn’t about fitting in. It’s about playing the part, then breaking character.
