Fashion

Maison Margiela Gives the Soft Girl a Hard Edge for Spring 2027

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 30, 2026

There are easier jobs in fashion than following John Galliano at Maison Margiela. Over a decade at the house, Galliano turned its runway into theater, building entire worlds around clothes, and ending his tenure with the kind of show that immediately entered fashion folklore. Glenn Martens, then, inherited more than a creative director title. He inherited expectations, fiercely protected house codes, and the unenviable task of figuring out what Margiela could look like after Galliano without spending his tenure impersonating him.

For Spring/Summer 2027, his latest answer began inside L’Élysée Montmartre, where the walls had practically disappeared beneath flowers. Created by Belgian florist Mark Colle, the installation was a direct nod to Raf Simons’ flower-covered debut couture show for Dior in 2012, only these blooms looked as though they had been left hanging there ever since. Roses, greenery, and dried stems browned and wilted across the walls, turning one of recent fashion history’s most recognizable sets into something closer to its ghost. The reference was deliberate. Margiela has always loved a replica, an appropriation and an object transformed through age, wear, or context. Here, even the set had been given the treatment.

Maison Margiela Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear set details.

Then Hole’s Violet came crashing through the speakers. It was an appropriately abrasive soundtrack for a collection called Hard and Soft, Martens’ study of two opposing forces that have shaped dressmaking for centuries. The premise came from the organization of the traditional Parisian atelier itself, where Tailoring handles structure and Flou deals in draping and dressmaking. Martens collapsed the division, borrowing techniques from both departments and forcing them onto the same garments. The result was Margiela at its most satisfying, when an ordinary piece of clothing begins behaving strangely.

Trench coats sprouted rigid panels across their waists and sides, while jackets and waistcoats were folded inward until their closures disappeared, with the creases fortified so the memory of that manipulation remained even if the garment was unfolded. Elsewhere, soft draping spilled from hardened structures, while corsetry appeared to have burst open down the body, creating enormous cowls that dropped from chest to ankle.

Martens has always enjoyed making clothes misbehave. At the now-shuttered Y/Project, jeans twisted around legs, collars multiplied, and garments seemed to have been put on incorrectly in increasingly ingenious ways. His Diesel has similarly found pleasure in distressing, shredding, and generally messing with things that were perfectly fine before he got his hands on them. That instinct makes considerable sense at Margiela, a house whose foundations were built on exposing linings, reversing construction, repurposing existing objects, and asking why clothes must be worn the way somebody decided they should.

Maison Margiela Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear.

Here, linings escaped again. Coat linings became clothes themselves or were attached to floral dresses sliced open and extended at the back, producing hybrids that appeared to be a coat and dress occupying the same body. The collection’s prettiest moments were often its strangest, especially the long, fluid dresses spray-painted with enormous birds. A pink-and-white gown carried a swan across the torso, its wing stretching over folds of fabric, while another came washed in pale turquoise with an eagle swooping across the chest. The images looked airbrushed onto something halfway between an oversized T-shirt and a Grecian gown, with fabric gathering and collapsing around the hips.

Against Colle’s decomposing garden, the birds almost looked like specimens from some surreal natural-history museum. And while the flowers surrounding them were dying, their printed counterparts were permanently caught in bloom. That tension between preservation and decay gave the show’s floral backdrop considerably more purpose than your standard Fashion Week Instagram bait.

Other dresses dispensed with imagery almost entirely. One nude, near-transparent gown was built around the body in long folds of chiffon, with fabric sweeping across the shoulders before gathering around the hips and falling to the floor. Another brown dress hung almost entirely from its own weight, plunging at the chest before collapsing into a pool of draping near the knees. On both, construction seemed to disappear until fabric simply appeared to be falling around a body.

In perhaps the most literal interpretation of the show’s title, flattened silverware was molded across the torso of a white floor-length dress, turning domestic objects into something resembling armor. Forks, plates, and indeterminate pieces of tableware protruded from the body in great metallic lumps. It was ridiculous, beautiful and extremely Margiela. The house that once made a waistcoat from broken plates had found another reason to raid the kitchen.

Martens’ softer proposition came with teeth, too. Black netting wrapped one model from shoulders to ankles, its open construction extending down the arms and legs until the body appeared caught inside a giant fishing net. The collection repeatedly played with that strange contradiction, making softness restrictive and hardness unexpectedly liberating. A rigid panel could give fabric somewhere new to fall; a barely-there net could suddenly make the body look contained. The press notes describe second-skin knits worn beneath netting, or net incorporated directly into those layers, allowing the two to become difficult to separate.

Denim arrived with hems chopped and reattached at different lengths. A brilliant blue waistcoat sat beneath a faded black denim jacket and gray trousers, while another model wore washed jeans with an almost anonymous beige jacket and layers of cream shirting underneath. After all the chiffon, birds, corsetry, and cutlery, their normality felt almost suspicious.

That may be where Martens has the clearest opportunity to make Margiela his own. Galliano’s Margiela became synonymous with transformation on an almost operatic scale. By the end, watching one of his Artisanal shows could feel closer to entering a film than attending a fashion show. Trying to reproduce that would be futile, and Martens appears aware of it. His Margiela so far feels more interested in the object itself: how it is made, how it sits on the body, what happens when you fold it the wrong way, expose what should be hidden or make the soft part hard.

Still, Galliano left very big Tabi-shaped shoes to fill, and there were moments here when the sheer volume of technique threatened to overwhelm the clothes themselves. But perhaps a little excess is inevitable when a designer is still negotiating his relationship with a house this loaded with history.

The accessories were undergoing the same experiment. The Ghost bags took traditionally rigid briefcases, weekenders, and vanity cases and removed their internal structures until they slumped in leather, while the 5AC was softened further. Shoes played their own tricks with balance, including heel-less pumps and boots whose actual high heels were concealed while tiny kitten heels remained visible underneath.

By the finale, dresses had literally been turned around. Open-backed gowns were worn back-to-front and draped again, with second-skin layers underneath allowing what had once been the exposed back to become the front. It was such a simple Margiela proposition that it almost summed up Martens’ challenge at the house. The thing already exists. Everyone knows what it looks like. The difficult part is finding another way to wear it.

Outside, Paris Fashion Week will continue debating whether Martens can fill Galliano’s shoes. Inside L’Élysée Montmartre, he seemed more interested in turning them inside out.

Scroll down to discover some of our favorite looks from Maison Margiela Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear.

Maison Margiela Gives the Soft Girl a Hard Edge for Spring 2027

Related Stories

More From Fashion

Newsletter

The only newsletter you won't unsubscribe from

Follow Us