In January 2025, after fourteen years, Y/Project closed its doors. One of the most influential and best-loved houses in contemporary fashion went out quietly, overwhelmed by financial difficulties and unable to find a buyer. Yet the mark left by the Parisian house, and by its creative director Glenn Martens, remains imprinted on the language of fashion today. Its story is worth retracing.

From Yohan Serfaty to Glenn Martens

Y/Project was born in Paris in 2010 as an avant-garde menswear project, founded by designer Yohan Serfaty with entrepreneur Gilles Elalouf. The first collections featured elongated, almost architectural silhouettes and a dark, tailored aesthetic. In 2013 Serfaty died of cancer, and Elalouf entrusted the creative direction to a young Belgian trained in Antwerp who had been Serfaty's assistant: Glenn Martens. He was the one who transformed the house, opening it up to womenswear, to a gender-fluid approach and to a deconstructed maximalism that brought Y/Project to the world's attention. The accolades followed: LVMH Prize finalist in 2016, ANDAM Grand Prix in 2017.

Trompe-l'oeil, denim and transformation

Y/Project's grammar revolved around the idea of the garment's transformation. The trompe-l'oeil, with denim and prints reproducing bodies, fake shirts or trousers; the iconic twisted, spiralling denim; and above all convertibility and layering, garments designed to be worn in several ways, with drop-down legs, flip-down waistbands and wandering zips. Add to that deconstructed tailoring and exaggerated proportions. Among the cult pieces: the ruched thigh-high boots born with UGG, the total-denim looks and the celebrated body prints that made the wearer look naked, or as if printed onto their own clothes.

The mark it left

Y/Project brought the idea of playful deconstruction, convertibility and trompe-l'oeil into the high-fashion mainstream, influencing a whole wave of younger brands and the return of denim as a couture material. But its greatest legacy runs through Glenn Martens, who in the meantime became creative director of Diesel (from 2020) and, on January 28, 2025, was named creative director of Maison Margiela succeeding John Galliano: the crowning, at the very top of luxury, of an experimental language that matured precisely at Y/Project.

The memorable collaborations

Few independent houses have collaborated so intelligently. The ruched boots with UGG (2018) became a cult piece; with Canada Goose (2020) came hybrid outerwear with warped silhouettes; with Melissa a long-running series of PVC footwear; with Jean Paul Gaultier (from 2022) a collaboration that deconstructed the house codes, between oversized Breton stripes and reimagined corsets. And then the sneakers with Fila and the ruched-up Salomon Speedcross. Every project was a small manifesto of irony and ingenuity.

The closure

The road to the end had begun in 2024: the death of co-founder Gilles Elalouf in July, the departure of the chief executive and, in September, Glenn Martens' farewell after eleven years. On September 26, 2024 the Paris Commercial Court placed the company in receivership. With no buyer, in January 2025 the house announced the immediate cessation of all activity. The final show had been Fall-Winter 2024, with a celebrity cast running from Charli XCX to Irina Shayk. The press read it as the end of an era for the Parisian avant-garde, and as the latest designer-led brand to fall in hard times for independent luxury.

The last goodbye, from the house's official account:

Y/Project no longer exists, but its twisted jeans, its trompe-l'oeil and its idea of a garment that transforms will live on in the runways it inspired, and in Martens' work at the summit of fashion. A farewell, not an erasure.