Everything You Need to Know About Y/Project in 1000 Words

Ask any style enthusiast about Y/Project, and they'll immediately mention its wunderkind creative director, Glenn Martens. Since being appointed in 2013, Y/Project's ascent has risen in lockstep with Martens’ whimsical perspective. However, the original “Y” in “Y/Project” refers to designer Yohan Serfaty, who launched the label in 2010. Serfaty was a beloved and enigmatic character who treated Y/Project as an extension of his personal wardrobe. His gothic, moody and leather-focused lines took off in Japan before he prematurely passed away just three years after the label’s inception. His business partner, Gilles Elalouf, selected Martens—a former assistant to Serafty—as a successor. Although Martens deliberated on whether he could succeed a force of nature like Serfaty, he eventually agreed. For Elalouf, the decision to hire the young (and then-unknown) Belgian made logical sense from both a creative and financial footing.

Growing up in the medieval wonder of Bruges, Martens attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the same prestigious university that produced the Antwerp Six and Demna Gvasalia. After working as a junior designer for Jean Paul Gaultier (a path not too dissimilar to the one once walked by Margiela), Martens took the reins of what he described as a brand still coming to terms with the loss of its founder.

Although Martens’ first few collections stayed true to Serfaty’s dark, brooding style, he eventually began to test new ideas, moving Y/Project’s core design language and aesthetic away from a Rick Owens-esque visual vocabulary and into altogether wilder territory. Playing with the dichotomy of good and bad taste and an obsession with opulence, absurdity and historical dress, Martens started to treat the label like a thought experiment. “I have always wanted to embrace the mistakes and the ugliness. I think we always wanted to be a brand that was pushing borders and limits and playing with the acceptable and unacceptable,” he stated after his FW21 show.

With a staunch commitment to sustainability (Y/Project mitigates ecological damage by using recycled and deadstock materials and creating “evergreen” capsules) and a post-gender point of view, Y/Project has long embodied the once-subversive values that are now common practice across the contemporary fashion landscape. Ultimately, the design process is one of radical freedom—a creative exercise in what they can get away with. Martens has even admitted that he and his team have momentary pauses of doubt before sending collections down the runway, yet this isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Consider it an organized form of resistance against the homogeneity and flatness in design that has come with globalization and digitization.

Y/Project signatures such as extreme layering, innovative ruching and draping, and a general disregard for utility have defined silhouettes of the 2020s and influenced some of the industry’s most notable innovators, garnering the label a reputation as your favorite designer’s favorite label. “The results are smart and don’t look like anything else, and they’re often funny—the kind of garments that cause double takes,” wrote the New York Times in 2022.

In the past, parading models like they had just been hit by a storm was once ignored or ridiculed by highbrow critics, but Y/ Project's provocations have helped normalize the outrageous, bringing a sense of humor to the live arena. With Martens now following a similar irreverent blueprint as creative chief at Diesel, the ripple effect is likely to elevate the Y/Project name further in the years ahead.

It’s not difficult to understand why Y/Project presides over some of the most dedicated and hardcore fans in fashion. The label strives to disrupt the feelings of numbness that come with a never-ending scroll—each garment is a reason to wake up, pause, zoom, think or even laugh. Although the signature items are its more wearable basics such as its cutout jeans or wire bags, the frequent provocateur has also incited its fair share of viral moments. There’s the outrageous collaboration with UGG (famously beloved by Rihanna), a pair of denim “shorts” cut narrow and thong-like, flipped finger jewelry and nearly NSFW trompe l'oeil body-morph pieces created for a capsule with Jean Paul Gaultier.

Once dubbed the “Swiss army knife of fashion” by Vogue, Y/ Project creates clothing that feels as timeless as it does timely, prioritizing the process of fearless creation over everything else. The label is ultimately about more than just a gifted designer's vision, it is a manifesto about the individual’s agency. A Y/Project coat looks as much at home in a techno club queue as it does on a grandmother in the garden.

Whether you choose to dress it up or down, or wear it slick, sporty or sexy, Y/Project gives the wearer drastic freedom of interpretation. Martens stocks wardrobes the same way a great chef stocks a kitchen: with only the freshest and highest quality ingredients, and no specific recipe to follow.

This feature is part of GOAT’s exploration of DECONSTRUCTION. Discover more about the influential artistic philosophy through the mind of Martin Margiela and the avant-garde founders of Ottolinger.