At 9 p.m. on a Tuesday night, as a frenzied crowd bottle-necked through a narrow gate and up four flights of stairs to a hollowed-out hall, the Y/Project show had the frenetic energy of Vetements a year or so ago. The cool kids are way into it, and the establishment has caught on. Glenn Martens’ spring collection, his second proper women’s show, delivered to both audiences with its strange, animated merger of period costumes, classic bourgeois style and 21st-century creative casualwear. Well done.
The collection has been lumped in with Vetements and Hood by Air for its streetwise, club-kid attitude and gender fluidity. While there were notes of both, the collection really belonged to neither camp. More accurately, it felt like Martens was stepping into the mischievous shoes left vacant by Jean Paul Gaultier, for whom Martens worked after graduating from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. A good deal of the collection zeroed in on Gaultier hero pieces — the trench, Breton stripes, cable knits and corsetry — here, done up in dark theatricality. For instance, a red and black Breton striped sweater was worn under a soft, leather bomber done in cable stripes while white jeans were cut with a detachable garter and chaplike legs. Trenches came oversized and folded into shorts; striped men’s shirts were reworked into corsets trimmed with curlicue folds, and a T-shirt with optical swirls over the breasts seemed a two-dimensional nod to the cone bra.
The street influence — robust cowhides, denim and tracksuits — at the beginning of the show yielded to romantic extravagance as Martens worked in silk moire, crushed velvet for pants and corseted gowns with pearl straps that could be filed under classics with a twist — and in the opulent, 18th-century spirit of “Amadeus.” In short, Martens’ work is grittier than Gaultier, cleaner than Vetements and more operatic than Hood by Air’s underground club.