Both trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, the two comrades have been exchanging as in a game of ping-pong for almost fifteen years.
By Valentin Perez
“Glenn was in a promotion above mine. As he had gone through all the imposed projects, I always asked him for advice, his opinion, ” recalls Stéphanie D'Heygere, referring to Glenn Martens, who also studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. , in Belgium.
“The first skirt made by Stéphanie at school was a very experimental XXL cushion which came to surround the body of the model”, cafte the person concerned. Her: “Pfff… That sucked! I thought I would be fired the first year…”
Proof that transmission is not just a matter of blood ties or generation, they have been exchanging like in a game of ping-pong for fifteen years. "We don't always agree, but we enrich each other, we discover, we learn together", they say together. Glenn Martens, artistic director of Y/Project since 2013, has made this Parisian label an exciting and sensual deconstructed label.
At her request, Stéphanie D'Heygere imagines the jewelry and certain accessories. "Of the people I work with, Stephanie is the one I've known the longest," says Glenn Martens. Psychologically, this reassures me. She's always there, smoking her cigarette before the show and saying to me: "Yes, it's going to be very good, it's your best collection!" She has the comforting presence of a little sister.
A Flemish sense of fitting in
Both come from Flanders: Stéphanie, daughter of an interior designer who introduced her to style, from Courtrai; Glenn, who inherited a taste for history and its connection to clothing from his parents and studied interior design, from Bruges. Same appetite for “bons vivants”, same playfulness and black humour. "The Flemish sense of getting in," they laugh, cigarettes in their mouths, with the same accent of the West Belgians. “We have this subtitled Flemish accent even on Flemish TV! , she laughs , when he remembers that he had to exchange in English with his teachers in Antwerp, so much the latter had difficulty understanding him.
At university, their end-of-studies collections already had a bit of the flavor that their work would later take on: an architectural ready-to-wear, turned upside down for him; a second-degree diversion of everyday objects in a surrealist perspective at home, who invents, for her personal label, D'heygere, card holder rings, cigarette holder loops... Barely landed at Y/Project in Paris, in 2013, Glenn Martens calls on his friend, then a consultant. It offers a leather belt whose aluminum buckle forms a Y. It's cardboard.
Since then, spiral earrings or earrings depicting positions from the Kama-sutra, tribal piercings, lacquered brass flowers have been born out of their dialogue. “Between us, everything is very fluid, ” they explain. You only need two appointments per season to work . We share ideas, photos by SMS, all between a joke and a heart emoji. In addition to their friendship, they have noticed that it is "a taste for the conceptual" that binds them. A camaraderie that the two accomplices, always ready for the next joke, the next text message, the next cigarette, do not intend to break anytime soon.
