Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Glenn Martens with Photographer Arnaud Lajeunie

For Maison Margiela’s Artisanal 2025 campaign, newly appointed creative director Glenn Martens continues his vision of fashion as conceptual sculpture, this time through a poetic disintegration of body, identity, and material. Shot by Arnaud Lajeunie and styled by Olivier Rizzo, the campaign reads as a haunting visual archive of garments that seem to exist between worlds. This isn’t just about selling couture, it’s a meditation on what it means to make it.

Photography here does more than document; it interrogates. Lajeunie’s lens is controlled and sculptural, framing the body as a still life. Each composition is lit with the neutrality of archival photography, emphasizing silhouette and surface over seduction. Interspersed throughout are raw, voyeuristic glimpses: models mid-fitting, backs exposed, heads turned. These moments inject vulnerability into the otherwise composed mise-en-scène, revealing the hand behind the artifice.

Image by image, the garments unfold as artifacts. In the opening visual, a figure is entirely encased in crinkled plastic, translucent sheeting wrapping the form from head to toe. Here, shape overrides identity. Plastic—an unremarkable, disposable material—takes on the gravity of glass or marble, transforming the wearer into an object of fragility and reverence. Another look reveals a statuesque silhouette in a body-length column of delicate lace and floral appliqué. A translucent veil creates a fading illusion upward, blurring the line between body and garment. Lace and tulle behave like extensions of the skin, blooming into dreamlike volume. Shot against a pearl-white backdrop that feels more like a stretched canvas than a sterile studio, the setting enhances the garment’s painterly quality—the figure becomes spectral.

Materiality is central to Martens’ vision. The body is treated not as a model, but as a medium—abstracted, anonymous, and deeply emotive. Garments are constructed from what might once have been discarded: upcycled linings, vintage leather, costume jewelry, and ordinary copy paper printed with 16th-century Flemish wallpaper motifs. Even face coverings, sculpted from crushed and burnished metal boxes, are transformed from refuse to regalia.

The sets reinforce this narrative. Shot in front of textured, collaged backdrops—some resembling decaying frescoes, others evoking deconstructed palatial rooms—the garments are situated within fractured architecture. These environments don’t distract; they mirror the collection’s themes of impermanence and reinvention. Crumpled paper walls and layered interiors echo the tension between history and fabrication embedded in each look.

In one of the most striking images, a dress of marbled golden velvet swells outward, consuming the figure entirely. The model, face, and limbs obscured become a swirling monument of movement frozen in time. It’s not just couture. It’s a sculpture. And it’s here that the campaign’s purpose comes into focus.

Each frame draws the eye first to the silhouette, then to the texture, and finally to the material. There is a choreography to how the images lead you. The use of obscured faces and abstracted forms directs focus to what’s constructed, not who wears it. Color is used sparingly but intentionally, appearing in florals, oxidation, or iridescent finishes that deepen the garments’ sense of dimension.

Unlike many campaigns that use minimalism as a placeholder for meaning, Margiela’s restraint feels intentional. Each absence is weighted. Every visual silence is composed. The lack of spectacle doesn’t flatten the message; it sharpens it, making room for texture, gesture, and the emotional resonance of material.

What emerges is less a campaign than a cinematic meditation on ephemerality, preservation, and process.

In a luxury landscape preoccupied with polish and permanence, Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025 stands defiantly ghostlike—layered, imperfect, and alive.

Taking over from John Galliano was no easy feat, but with this campaign, Glenn Martens doesn’t merely honor the house’s legacy, he channels its spirit into a new era.