Can a cult fashion brand appeal to the whole world? | CNN

When Glenn Martens became the creative director of Paris-based fashion house Maison Margiela in January 2025, he expected never to show his face again. After all, the founder of the brand, Martin Margiela, has rarely been seen. Ever. Anonymity was key to the Belgian’s conception of making clothes: rather than big, corporate, and pop, he saw fashion as small, artisanal, elusive. He covered models’ faces with masks and dressed his workers in white lab coats. In a famous portrait from 2001, captured by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue, the entire staff pose cross-armed in their little white coats, with a chair left empty in the front row for the designer. Those who took on the label after Margiela’s 2009 retirement have largely followed suit: Matthieu Blazy (the man now heading up fashion’s biggest and splashiest name, Chanel) was not publicly recognized as Margiela’s creative lead until journalist Suzy Menkes “outed” him in 2014. More recently, the controversial designer John Galliano used the house’s reticence as a refuge to rebuild his reputation after a series of antisemitic rants led to his ouster from French fashion monolith Dior in 2011. But on a beautiful Paris aftern