“Wrong In The Right Way”—The Royal Chaos of H&M x Glenn Martens
Together, Martens and Johansson have shaped a unique approach to this collaboration, one which applies his lens to established H&M favorites. Hence the Martens namecheck on the brand’s bestselling boxer brief. “I’m very experimental. And I have this whole twisting game: to project something different on the recognizable. So the starting point here was to project this twist on H&M bestsellers. And at H&M the bestseller is like everywhere, very black and white and gray. And we wanted some color, too. So we ended up pushing it further and applying the twist to other universal archetypes of wearability: which is how we ended up in Britain.”
The rails reveal a delirious fever dream of stereotypical style anglais in which Martens’s Y/Project-vintage experiments in form and fabric provide the hallucinogenic substance. There are check country shirts, bags, and trench coats in his past-signature metal foil construction that allow the wearer to mold the garments into crazily disrupted contortions. “The production process was super-difficult,” sighs Johansson. Over-dyed preppy cable-knit sweaters are wrenched open around the neckline and garment dyed into a depth far more swirling than their typical primary-color iteration. Frayed hem jersey pieces, janty-silhouette two-tone denim jeans, whiskered denim jackets, overprinted trompe-l’œil argyle and tartan skirts and dresses, thigh-high denim boots, preppy cotton shirts with articulating collars, ironically tinny regal jewelry, and jersey printed with the silhouette of a magnificently-turreted castle are further entertainingly twisted highlights on the hangers. Says Martens: “The idea was to take archetypes everyone knows and give them the freedom to misbehave.”
Which brings us to the campaign, which will be everywhere by the time this collection launches on October 30. Shot in London, it stars Joanna Lumley and Richard E. Grant as the matriarch and patriarch of an anarchic/parodic multiverse reflection of a royal family. Notes the designer: “That’s because every piece in the collection could belong to one big, eccentric family, maybe a bit deranged, but somehow also very united.” It might channel the British royals, but this collection’s true king and queen are Martens and Johansson.