On a grey October morning, the royal family looks a little different. They stand not in front of a palace but on a scaffold, pigeons fluttering, kilts swaying, the Scottish Highlands printed like a postcard behind them. Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant play monarchs of a make-believe Britain, surrounded by courtiers dressed in foil trenches and wired denim that fold and bend at will.

It is absurd, charming, and strangely elegant, which is to say, perfectly Glenn Martens.

That multiplicity runs through the entire collection. The Scrunch Bag becomes both object and joke, half sculpture and half satire on function. The thigh-high boots revive a Y/Project prototype once considered impossible to industrialise. Trenches and knits morph from day to night with a few simple gestures. Every piece feels playful yet engineered, sexy yet self-aware, practical yet somehow subversive — the kind of humour that rarely survives mass production, here embedded in every fold. The campaign pushes that irony even further. Photographed like a royal portrait that has gone deliciously off-script, it replaces castles with scaffolds and corgis with chaos. Tartan and tweed mix with foil and gloss. The mood is British heritage seen through a Belgian filter: tongue-in-cheek, theatrical, slightly melancholic. “Witty, not pretty” could easily serve as its secret caption.

Martens has never been interested in surface beauty. His career is built on tension and contradiction — elegance that reveals its seams, sensuality that laughs at itself. From Bruges to Antwerp to Paris, from Jean Paul Gaultier to Diesel and now Margiela, he has turned the act of twisting into a kind of philosophy. His approach to form is part humour, part rebellion, part technical obsession. At H&M, that instinct becomes an experiment in scale. This is his first collaboration under his own name, a rare exception in H&M’s twenty-year history of designer partnerships. After Karl Lagerfeld in 2004, Martens becomes only the second designer to headline a collaboration as an individual rather than through a brand. It’s an unusual kind of recognition — a creative ego willingly filtered through the machinery of the high street.

It also speaks to H&M’s long-term strategy, steered by Ann-Sofie Johansson, the brand’s Head of Design and Creative Advisor. Since overseeing her first designer partnership two decades ago, Johansson has turned collaboration into both a creative experiment and a business model. “The idea was always to give people access to something they otherwise might not afford,” she explains. “But also to ask what happens when two worlds meet. What can we create together that neither could make alone?” Her enthusiasm for Martens was immediate. “Glenn has this weird, beautiful energy,” Johansson says. “He’s experimental but still grounded in craftsmanship. He takes archetypes and makes them feel alive.” For her, this collection continues H&M’s dialogue between democracy and creativity — a tension she calls “the curiosity of something else.”

And yet, the experiment raises a larger question: how democratic can a magician be?
For two decades, H&M has promised access to the unattainable. But Martens’ work has always thrived on distortion, on turning convention inside out. When the couture impulse meets the logic of the mass market, something unpredictable happens. What emerges is not compromise but a hybrid. The result feels both democratic and strange, a collection that refuses to hide its dual nature.

The essentials

• Launch: October 30, selected stores and hm.com
•  Range: womenswear, menswear, unisex, accessories
• Focus: moldable construction using foil and wire, twisted denim, oversize boots, scrunch bags
• Mood: post-royal, British-camp, witty, democratic, strange

These quick facts may sound like a brand deck, but that is part of the irony. H&M’s archive provided the base patterns, its “top list” of global bestsellers. Martens treated them like ready-mades, folding them back into something tactile and alive. The garments are recognisable yet unsettled, like archetypes seen through a distorted mirror. “You can play with it,” he insists. “That’s the point.” And play is exactly what this collaboration delivers. The trench coat that can be reshaped into a cropped jacket. The knit that can hang low and slouch or be tightened into a sculpted silhouette. The denim traced with embroidered “whiskers” instead of bleached fades. Every detail invites improvisation, like a design exercise left open for the wearer to finish.

Fun, but not frivolous. The deeper message is about authorship. These clothes ask their wearers to decide how they should exist, what shape they should take, when to look elegant and when to collapse into disorder. In that sense, Martens’ H&M capsule becomes a study in creative participation. Still, beneath the laughter and the foil, there is a quiet critique of the system itself. Martens’ approach makes visible the very thing fast fashion tries to hide: the hand, the process, the instability of design. His work exposes the mechanisms of beauty while insisting that joy remains possible within them. By the time the press talk winds down, after all the jokes and the anecdotes, Martens delivers his final punchline. As a teenager in Bruges, he once joked that he used to shoplift from H&M — small acts of mischief in the name of curiosity. Today, his name runs along the waistband of its underwear. It is the most poetic full circle imaginable. Access was never neutral. You do not simply receive fashion; you take it, reshape it, make it your own.

Maybe that is what magic in the mass market looks like.
And maybe being wrong in the right way is the only way left to do it.