Some fashion shows are so good that they develop their own cult following. And this is one of them. The way some people were used to follow the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, or Metallica on tour from city to city, there are also people who follow fashion designers from city to city, to see and revere their latest work in awe and adulation. Like rabid football fans, they dress up in the same style as that their heroes latest work would dictate. And like Justin Bieber fans they scream while taking pictures outside the event even if they have no ticket to get into the venue. And so it oddly is as well with Glenn Martens Y/Project show, which year after year, like good old Burgundy wine, only just gets a little darker and better still.

One must then wonder therefore what it is precisely with Belgian fashion designers that makes them special and stand out. For Belgium is a small country yet they have so many well-known designers. Here is just a simple five who are showing this week alone in Paris: Glenn Martens, Walter van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, and of course Raf Simons, who need no introduction to a fashion public. So perhaps that it is not coincidence that Glenn Martens harks from the dark old city of Bruges, that obscure and hidden left over from a dark medieval past which never completely seemed to have reached modernity – not even until today. For was not this city the capital of Old Burgundy, a 14^th century empire that stretched all the way from Switzerland to Amsterdam? And which mysteriously disappeared within the deep mist of European history?

Sorry that it needed that long introduction but only then will you perhaps understand a little bit about the origins of the creativity of this fabulous and fascinating show which gets better every year. The press release describes the work as ‘graphic tailoring woven into structural elegance’ as a technical description and almost every time there is an underground scene in the show ambiance but the effects of the materials used, the form, the shapes, the colors, and the cut and the design with Y/Project somehow always become visible upon the faces of models on the runway expressed as a strange but intense form of self-confidence.

And it is for a reason that they seem to breathe and represent the cockiness of princes or pashas. Can you spot Napoleon, Henri the IV, Louis XIV and other notables past in the runway line up in the slideshow below? Not only in the patchwork prints and the design, but in the faces of the actual models? For indeed it is rather remarkable what kind of confidence grand clothes can make for man: The confidence of the Prince – oddly fitting in the age of Donald Trump – which as the theme for this Y/Project show Glenn Martens aptly calls ‘the real Slim Shady’ after the nickname of the rough mean street alter ego of rapper Eminem.

Aha, so THAT is what grand clothing can bring out in a man, and it also explains the cult following of this fabulous and highly creative work of the sartorial arts called Y/Project.

And did anyone notice that Glenn Martens is an Eminem lookalike?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words by Sandro and photos from Y Project.