Martine Rose (Q3321)
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Martine Rose is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Martine Rose |
Martine Rose is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“I want it to feel a little bit messy. Maybe I want to go against the expectations of a show in Milan a bit. I want to make it so that people don’t immediately walk into the show and get it.” So said Martine Rose last week of her plans for this show shortly before decamping from Crouch End to prepare it. Go time was this afternoon, straight after Prada—and everything Rose wanted, Rose got.That messiness was communicated through the roughly guillotined Rose-imagery flyers that were strewn in front of the bleacher seating and the lo-fi scaffolding stanchions wrapped in material that punctuated the runway and contained Rose crew members who lit the models’ here-and-there route with torches. Not immediately getting the show was central to Rose’s project, not because she’s a hardscrabble Londoner coming into the land of caramel nappa pants but because the territory she wanted to explore and turn us on to was about the fringes of beauty.Hence the noses: “The first thing you see in people is often their nose. And it is often the first thing they change about themselves.” Rose’s latex prosthetics, just like the hermit long wigs, were meant to obscure any immediate association in the audience with character and instead let their antennae react to the clothes. There was still the sense of family and community, here transmitted in the pieces printed with photo-booth shots of friends, family, and colleagues as well as the Rose-signature parody soccer shirts that this season saluted the mighty Inter Milan. However, the rough devices used to partially anonymize the models worked, after the initial WTF, to push your eye toward the garments.These notably included finely tailored pencil skirts over net socks worn by evidently male models (around 25% of the show was womenswear) and Rose’s lushly lurid chisel-toe footwear. Said Rose: “It’s shocking because it’s unfamiliar, but it’s not actually shocking. The skirt is Bermuda-short length. A lot of men in India wear lungis. There’s nothing radical about a kilt. But this manages to be radical in a way that doesn’t really make sense.” Chap-silhouette suiting trousers were similar in the way they slyly stirred kink but were also perfectly proper.As a Londoner, it stirred my soul to hear “Lamborghini” by Shut Up and Dance featuring Ragga Twins practically in the shadow of Fondazione Prada’s golden haunted house.
Pushing that partiality aside, this new context also tested the reach of Rose’s sensually subversive distortions of archetype. Happily nothing here—from her moto-boob dresses and shirts to her bait-buckle bondage belts (that also double up as handcuffs)— seemed lost in translation.ForzaMartine Rose!
16 June 2024
Martine Rose convened another of her phenomenally heart-warming, powerfully directional shows in London on January 6. Roses were everywhere—grandparents, parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, and her children. Friends stood, whooped, danced, and cheered while the models—a cast of her favorite local heroes—proceeded to high-style it out. It was part Vogue ball, part riotous community fund-raising event—a night packed with laughter, warmth, and a wow-factor surprise. Because here was Martine Rose serving drop-dead elegant fashion.Phones were banned, but she’d had the show filmed, and released it at a screening during the Paris menswear. And then—another surprise—she did the show again for the fashion crowd tonight.“I was sort of just deconstructing what I care about, and what I really think is important,” she’d said on the night of the London show. “Which is how clothes can make you feel transformed. I really think this is a message now: to make something that felt joyful. I always talk about community a lot. I thought well, let’s actually do a community show, let’s do something that feels collective and empowering and fun.”She asked the audience to put away their phones because, “I didn’t want the focus to be on anything other than that moment of transformation and pleasure. There’s always the problem that phones pull us away, distract us and remove us so much from from the situation we’re in. And I really wanted that everyone should be present, to just be here with us in this room celebrating these amazing people who have been transformed by clothes.”On came a guy in an electric blue moire suit, with a matching shirt and bolo tie, proudly owning the runway. Out stalked a pair in sharp pointy heels, crombie coats, neon green skinny jeans and shirts, hair piled into towering bouffant curls. This was not the streetwear take you might expect of Martine Rose. Something else was happening: wrapping, draping, and asymmetry. First, it was with men’s technical jackets or shirts recut almost like ponchos. Then the womenswear: a satin-edged blanket was turned into a chic one-sleeved tunic, worn over leather jeans. A body-celebrating black leather dress came sexily draped and knotted about the wearer.Martine Rose already occupies a highly regarded place as a major influence on men’s fashion.
This show demonstrated those powers all over again—who else could’ve come up with that furry brown lurex pinstriped coat-suit? Up to now, the fashion she’s designed for women has been more of a casual cool-girl mirroring of the twists on sport-genre clothing she does for men. But with this collection—with its incredibly cool elegance—she showed that she’s easily as inspirational a leader in women’s fashion.In difficult, fearful periods such as the one we’re living in, fashion’s instinctive response is to go sober, safe, and stick to tried-and-tested “commerciality.” The trouble with that is that it causes paralysis, dullness, and a downward spiral in desirability. With this collection, Rose went completely in the opposite direction—for the elevation and elation of dressing; for creativity and the high ground.At the end of her London show, lots of friends, family, and children took their own turns on the catwalk. It finished up with a raffle in aid of St Giles Trust, a UK charity that helps people held back by poverty, homelessness, exploitation, and abuse. On all kinds of levels, she’s a woman who shines.
18 January 2024
Far-flung “destination” shows may be this year’s mania, but honestly there’s nothing to equal the destination-sensation of a neighborhood Martine Rose show. This time, the place was St Joseph’s Community Centre in Highgate, in north London, where she convened one of her inimitably human inter-generational slices of real life—children, teens, parents, aunties, uncles, and assorted fashion folk gathered together on a sunny Sunday evening to enjoy each other’s company. No one else is capable of underlining a show with such a socially purposeful vibe.“Before there were actual club venues as such, people from so many communities co-opted community centers and youth clubs to put on their club nights. All over London, wherever waves of immigrants have come in, you saw them—West Indian, Turkish, Polish, Irish—everyone has had their own community centers. They’re really important, the life-blood, ” Rose said. ”And this one is untouched. I thought it would be fun for people to sit down, have a drink, and feel pulled into participating in something.”Her living celebration of London subcultural codes opened on a blast of reggae. Out walked the totally believable Martine Rose cast of characters in clothes layered in her subversively kinky takes on men’s and womenswear. “I love playing with gender lines. I find it very sexy—I love men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes. It’s things that I’ve played with a long time. And I think it’s a real proposition. Not a gimmick, you know, a genuine proposal.”Sure enough, there was a complete and recognizable wardrobe of recurring Rose signatures—her oversized tailored jackets, voluminous floor-sweeping coats, and reappropriated hi-viz workwear and sportswear. To give it a sense of lived-in ownership, she used worn-in, washed, and patinated materials.“Because I never like it when things look new. There’s a kind of make-do-and-mend—like denim we patched with gaffer tape,” she explained.Rose developed the hunched-forward shouderline of women’s leather jackets from looking at the posture of motorbike-riders. Her ideas seem always to come up through those kinds of socially-observed transferences—from the pre-existing, from gestures or half-dressed slip-ups. Her women’s skirts were inside out, with pleats bursting from under linings, creating a cool volume. Then there were her wicked twists of humor. “For menswear, I always like this tension between two poles.
I’m using quite classic things like tailoring and sportswear, but the other pole has to be quite far apart. So I was looking at quite stately lady things, like Barbour jackets cut on a ’50s women’s a-line, corsetry, and pearls.” And all of a sudden, you glimpse a very British class joke going on.But the reason that Martine Rose is such an international influence is her startling genius for originating serious fashion. One particular is what she does with footwear—for a start, her Nike Shox MR 4 mule-sneakers jacked up on spring heels. Now, there’s basically a whole Martine Rose shoe-shop on offer: clunky square-toed loafers and tapered long-nosed kitten-heeled slip-ons for all genders. Also this season is the reveal of the plumped-up shapes she’s made as guest creative director of Clarks. “They explained their top priority is comfort. So I thought, okay! Let’s make it ridiculously comfortable, like a pillow for the foot!” Clarks is an egalitarian British footwear company that’s been a part of high streets and the nostalgia of family life forever. What could be a better fit for the ethos of Martine Rose?
12 June 2023
The venue for Martine Rose’s first-ever non-hometown show was one of finest Pitti and Florence could offer, which was only a fitting reception for one of London’s finest designers. We were downtown, a few blocks up from the Ponte Vecchio, seated in eccentric fashion beneath the 16th-century loggia in Piazza del Mercato Nuovo.By day this vaulted structure is typically thronged with stalls selling passable leather goods and dubious sweatshirts, most definitely not Made in Italy, to an abundant footfall of dawdling tourists. This evening it was transformed into a luridly shag-piled, mirror-ceilinged discotheque inhabited by a fast-walking clientele of dressed characters. Some of these seemed distinctly of London, others more discernibly Italianate, and yet more were drawn from a fantasy-fueled fusionminestroneof the two.In a preview meeting Rose said that after Pitti had invited her to join its pantheon of guest designers this season: “My first question to myself was ‘how can I do what I do in London and transport it into Florence?’ And what I wanted to do instinctively was to really respond to the culture and the history of Italy.”Rose, though, is very specific in her cultural proclivities. In London we regularly go back to the late ’80s and ’90s as she conjures a rogue’s gallery of types cast creatively through a prism of dance music—mostly hardcore and jungle—and terrace-referencing laddishness touched by attitude, rebellion, and a soupçon of knowing sleaze. Here she said she was extending that prism to Italo Disco (house-prefiguring Italian New Wave) andcalcio storico fiorentino(a football-prefiguring Middle Ages contact sport) in order to expand her frame of reference.Once we got to the market things got a little frenetic. That eccentric seating—an unlovable love-seat arrangement for many—and a hither-thither choreography meant that those fast-walking models carefully streetcast from across Florence (including local calcio storico players), Milan, and London delivered less than two seconds per-look of meaningful eye-time.This was a production stumble not one of design, but it was a shame not to be able fully to appreciate the latest update of Rose’s Nike collab, or the many half-skirted tailored jackets and bumster pants, waistlines spilt over with satin shirting, that were exclusively party at the back. What you could glean on the spot, plus appreciate online later, was that this was vintage Rose with a subtly fresh flavor.
Fringed tracksuits and tailoring were an interesting mosey westwards. The signature chisel shoe-shapes were as evocative of the Sky magazine years as ever. Silhouettes were manipulated via stiffened knits and swollen-shouldered, waist-nipped outerwear. Worn genres were clashed within looks, creating a highly-designed apparent chaos that emphasized the powerfully distinct features of the curated cast of characters chosen to wear them. The music segued from Italo-house to London’s hardcore.The happy fact is that Rose’s work translated finely to Florence, just as we have already seen it influentially expressed as part of a larger luxury chorus of fashion design, just not under her name, in Paris. Afterwards Rose was mobbed just alongside theFontana del Porcellino. This fountain is graced with an ancient-ish bronze wild boar who legend holds is the transfigured victim of a girlfriend who couldn’t keep a secret. Apparently, touching its snout brings you luck. Had Rose heard the story? “Absolutely! And I’ve been rubbing its nose for days!” No luck needed: Rose makes her own.
12 January 2023
“You know, I’m just interested in loads of different types of people. And it’s always the people on the edges and in the corners and in the shadows that I want to hang out with.” Martine Rose, who has long been the very definition of London cool, sends a frisson around town when people hear that she’s having one of her rare shows. Where will it be, and who will she have been looking at for what she calls her “observational” design ideas? Because—such is her influential her track record—where Rose goes, others will soon be following.This time, she convened her show under an archway at Vauxhall, its wall draped with latex curtains. She’s a south Londoner by birth, and—as always—her location was deliberately chosen to draw attention to the existence of a London community. The arch, she thinks, is the site of the very underground club where she had her 14th birthday party. “It was called Strawberry Sundays,” she laughed, rolling her eyes. “But really, this area is very significant for the gay community, because historically it’s where all these clubs were, and the Victoria Tavern—which is still going—that were really a sanctuary, I think, for a lot of gay men before dating apps began. So the space is inspired very much by sex clubs, and the notion of cruising, and very sort of sub-cultural activities.”The thing about Rose is her knack for reinventing existing genres of clothing, surreptitiously imbuing them with signals that set them just far enough out of the straight and ordinary to turn the heads of in-the-know fashion people, while the clothes themselves always remain wearable. Her nips and tweaks are capable of making the kinds of shifts in silhouettes that eventually put other silhouettes out of fashion—and this is exactly what her multifarious cast of night-time people were showcasing as they hurried past.“I think the effect of the pandemic on me is that I’ve gone very micro, paying attention to things which I maybe wouldn’t have had the time to do before,” she explained while prepping the show. “So we’ve got all these ‘pulled’ effects, this feeling of pressure and tension.” Sexual tension, all right: For a start, she had all eyes magnetized to the crotch area, cloth pulled awkwardly towards flies which seemed to have been hurriedly mis-zipped, an effect re-emphasized by the dangle of ring-pulls and key chains.
13 June 2022
Martine Rose has a deadpan talent for materializing sociopsychological states. This season, she’s turned it onto a skewering of the discombobulated ways that WFH has impacted the manner in which people dress. The people in her look book stand caught in the endless hybrid-office/domestic-employment cycle that’s become corporately normalized since the pandemic. “It’s almost a dream state we found ourselves in, somewhere between work and sleep. The boundaries have been really broken down and blurred between working from home and in the office. It’s a very murky sort of bed-sleep-work day that never ends, taking Zoom meetings until whatever time,” she observed, with perfect irony, on a Zoom call from her London studio.The “numb and surreal” feeling of this new way of living (as she puts it in her press release) manifests in a collection that subtly negotiates personal-versus-public dual realities in all her subversively kinky ways. There are office-presenting tailored suits—yes, in the Martine Rose world, they turn out to be made from women’s lingerie fabric. “I bought up all the deadstock from an old Italian ladies-underwear factory that sadly closed down during COVID. It’s this beautiful power mesh they used to make girdles and corsets.”Her bed-work idea led her to thinking about that all-too-familiar digital-meeting scramble to pull on something to wear from a heap of clothes at home. Thus the perma-wrinkle texture she had woven into Japanese denim and the quick-change device of twinsets to pull on over the head—not just a cardigan and matching sweater but fused jacket-coat-and-knit looks too.Eiderdowns and pajamas in “granny florals“ turned up as frilled-edge comfort-blanket stoles draped stylishly around the shoulders of pretty blue-and-white flower-sprigged total looks. Trust Martine Rose to give an accurate commentary on where we are. Her ability to do that, while shifting the dial on what’s cool—usually well ahead of the pack—is exactly what makes her a legend among followers. A footnote on that: When fans zoom in on these pictures, they’ll see the future in the bulb-toe dress shoes she’s pioneering with this collection. They’re a sly but definite step away from her square-toe shoes, which influenced the whole of menswear fashion a while back. Where the great Martine Rose leads, the rest follow.
9 March 2022
“I saw a video about Bob Fosse, and what really struck me was how many older men he had dancing, and how that looked really sexy and cool. Balding men as the sort of romantic lead—I loved it. And I thought, isn’t that funny? We’re used to seeing all different types of people leading fashion on the catwalks, except we haven’t seen balder, old men. So I decided to put them at the center and front.”That’s the thought that set Martine Rose on her typically affirmative-slash-subversive path to making a lookbook and video for her fall 2022 collection: the idea of getting a group of older guys together, to dance. “It was wonderful watching them, because there’s something that just happens when you dance. They sort of relaxed and stuff, this youthfulness came out. It was so fun,” she said. “Because I think the thing is, when you’re younger, and you view aging from a distance, you imagine that you’re going to grow up and you’re going to feel differently. And then you start growing up yourself and you realize that nothing really changes, you know. You still want to do those things you still love!”These guys had the moves alright. Rose brought in three women photographers—Sharna Osbourne, Rosie Marks, and Camille Vivier—to get the party started on a set which involved a turntable, a treadmill, and a chopped-up car hulk. “We were thinking of a time when those sorts of men in the ’60s would be in adverts for cars, watches, and booze. But really, it was about collisions of lots of different things, like subcultures, club cultures, with very male codes underneath them.”Look up Fosse’s totally delightful ’60s club-fashion pastiche “Rich Man’s Frug” to see why women wearing tinsel wigs also got in on Rose’s act. (Truth is that women like to buy her clothes almost as much as men.) Nothing’s straight-on in Martine Rose-world, though. The attraction’s always in her slyly sleazy twists on under-observed social signifiers. There’s a bit of flash—a shiny silver tailored suit; her satin shirts with buttons sliding on the diagonal, and, this time, a tucked-in neckline. “That,” she laughed, “was the idea of being in such a hurry to get into the club that you don’t even care how you’ve pulled on your clothes!”Her prints hold coded stories too. Some are taken from rave flyers promoting ‘Carefree Dancing’ and ‘Alive With Pleasure.’ Paint-splashed tracksuit prints recall Gabber ravers of the ’90s.
There’s a telephone-receiver print version—red, on a pair of white plastic jeans—inspired by 1980s Athena airbrush poster art by Syd Brak. “Which felt,” she chuckled, “kind of suggestive. Because we always have our tongue firmly in our cheek.”
14 January 2022
“People always assume I’m a big football fan because I reference it so often, but truth be told it’s the culture not the game itself that interests me,” says Martine Rose. In the name of research and sheer curiosity, the British designer attended her first soccer game ever this week, an historic win for England over their archrivals Germany that played out at London’s landmark Wembley Stadium.To call soccer a national obsession would be an understatement—the fact that football could be finally “coming home” as they say in the UK, with the England team odds on favorites to win the Euro 2021 Cup, seems to be buoying the spirits of the entire country right now. Rose’s personal fascination with the sport begins at a particularly significant inflection point in the history of football culture: the moment it collided with dance music. “When club culture fully came into fruition in 1989, the cases of football hooliganism dropped dramatically, it basically died overnight. Instead of fighting on the terraces, these guys were out dancing, taking pills on a Saturday night,” she explains. “For me that demonstrates the power of culture, the power of music to change things for the better.”Somewhere between the football terraces, the dance floor, and the notion of business casual, Martine Rose has consistently found her sweetspot. Those familiar with the British term Wide Boy will recognize the aesthetic instantly, one Rose describes as equal parts menacing and alluring, “that guy you sort of fancy but can’t quite tell if he’ll be nice to you.” Her latest collection distills that look down to its most essential parts with a sense of play and ease. Sporty neon mock-neck shirts, oversized polos, and archetypal zip-up track jackets are layered up with starched candy-stripe button-downs and spiffy quilted overcoats. The idea of kink is never too far away for Rose, and this time around she cut her signature chaps from snap-button track pants, a deliciously subversive wink at hypermasculine dress codes.The real showstopper this season is for sure the tailoring. Boxy suiting was a recognizable trademark for Rose long before it was trending, and for spring that silhouette gets a strong, tight shoulder that looks particularly fresh rendered in crushed lilac velvet on a women’s jacket shown with matching trousers. It's hardly surprising that women currently represent about half of the Martine Rose customer base—she's quick to note that women featured in her first-ever runway.
Over the last year, the brand’s good-taste-bad-taste square-toe shoes in particular have been a hit with her female clients. If the new collection is anything to go by, then her excellent tailoring is bound to score high points across the board too.
4 July 2021
“It’s us giving some sort of social commentary to a look book. Everyone is very familiar with interiors in one way or another these days,” says Martine Rose. One glance at the semi-clad guys lounging with laptops in booths on aspirational cream furniture and bathroom fittings will tell you that there is no interruption whatsoever to the Martine Rose subversive social-reality service this season. While others have maybe been musing about such solitary occupations as crafting, painting, exercising, and dancing during isolation, her mind has turned to the booming pastime of lockdown sex. “Because of COVID, webcam girls have been creating these sets in huge hangar warehouses. I thought it’s a really interesting sign of the times. Whether we’re having sex, consuming sex, or just on Zoom calls 12 hours a day, we’re all having very intimate experiences with interiors,” she says, inevitably on a Zoom call, from her studio in North London.So her eye-opening slice of subculture reality this time placed her collection in front of a casting of professional webcam boys and nude models. Says Rose: “I always do my shows in community. I like exploring what happens when you bring outside people into fashion—it’s like, who’s included? I enjoy the privilege of working with people I wouldn’t normally come across: cross sections of people who come together.”This season’s scenario represents no deviation from the gender and identity suggestions that Rose loves to run through the masculine codes of business and sportswear. First up: her “undone businessman,” who is wearing a beige raincoat and trousers, shirt half-untucked. “He’s coming apart slightly—you can start to see the cracks,” she says. Well, yes, look into the shadows, and he’s also wearing a suspender belt.If we tear our eyes away from the glimpses of booth action, Rose’s design developments come into focus. The look of the karate gi has been applied to the wrapped cut of tailored jackets and a trench coat. Football (as in soccer) references—a Rose favorite—are in play in jacquard stripes on trousers, belts decorated with metal badges, and embroidered shields bearing the Martine Rose club logo. Tucked in are miniaturized sports bags.There is a woman on the scene too. “She’s our boss woman. Our football manager,” says Rose. “She’s very much in charge.
” At one point, she has on a tight striped shirt, straining at the buttons, a garment Rose based on the observation of the kind of fitted shirts that male office workers wear. “When you go into the City of London, you see them everywhere,” she says. She showed it too, on “our slightly perverse banker in a stretch shirt which is much too tight for him.” The satirical exaggeration took the designer who pioneered oversized garments to a new place. “It’s a new silhouette. I love how obscene they are, really,” she adds.Elsewhere among the cast of London inhabitants is “our club guy, this wide boy character. We wanted him to feel like he’s just jumped out of his Mercedes, and he’s going into a club, holding his key chain.” Eventually, he becomes the man Rose says she loves the most, the culmination of her fusion of eroticism and subverted norms. He’s wearing a camisole and jeans. “For me, this looks really believable, really sexy,” she concludes. “And who cares what the orientation is?”
25 September 2020
“This is my daughter’s school, and it’s really great and optimistic. I just wanted everyone to feel that,” said Martine Rose. “Kids, young people, education are our future and we should invest in them. Primary schools are magical. The teachers are here, there’s a lot of people with kids—it’s another community, isn’t it?”People still talk of the open-air show that Rose put on in a neighborhood square in Chalk Farm for summer 2019; it really was one of those atmospheres that make misty-eyed memories. She was one of the first designers to sit a fashion audience among local residents. Warm, friendly, inclusive vibes, without being saccharine, are what she’s very good at fostering. This time, we were sitting in the hall of the public school that Rose’s four-year-old attends, surrounded by children’s art, banners commemorating the anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement, and boards asking kids, “What kind of leader will you be?” It created that same sort of local family vibe, to start with.As a character, Rose is a strange mix of unpretentiousness and self-belief. One of her favorite games is playing with logos and slogans. “Martine Rose Expect Excellence” read one. The words “Tottenham, Croydon, Clapham Junction, Tooting” were woven into jacquards on her big, lairy tailored jackets, name-checking all the areas in London that Rose and her family have lived and worked in. She’s actually a champion of the ordinary and the bizarre—and her talent in fashion is that she doesn’t make any distinctions between them, or between what’s considered beautiful or ugly. “The inspirations are always the same. It’s always about outsiders,” she said.Nor does she particularly comply with seasons, or doing something completely new every time she has a show, which is according to when she feels like it. Her street-cast crew were indeed her avatars of oddness, from the side-swiped frizzes on the top of their heads, to the margins of extra sole beneath their feet, in collab with Six London, according to show credits.In between, Rose clothed her neighborhood heroes in pieces she said she’s reprised from her archive, “with a bit of friction” from something sexy. Black latex made an appearance as she cut a signature wrap-fastened jacket as an elongated coat-dress, and put kilt buckles on a tight, shiny pencil skirt. Womenswear? No, she hasn’t really done that before.
Rose may be a responsible, education-promoting mom of two in her 40s these days, but it was no stretch to imagine her in these bits and pieces back in the day when she was dressing up to club in the ’90s.
6 January 2020
When she chooses her moment to speak, people flock to hear what Martine Rose has to say. This time, her choice of location was loaded with sarcasm—an astro-turfed roof garden at the top of a corporate building in the City of London, which she invaded with an oddball stream of be-wigged characters wearing clothes she’d revived from memories of club culture in the ’80s.Like Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy show, it was a defiant—and even more angry—response to the political mess Britain is in, with no resolution to Brexit in sight and trust in politicians at an all time low. The viewing was a very different experience from the welcoming warmth of the local neighborhood street party Rose held this time last year; deliberately so. She was wearing a T-shirt featuring the sloganPromising Britainwith a cartoon of a clown surrounded by European Union flag stars when she came out to explain her collection—a blunt satirical indictment of what’s been going on in the Houses of Parliament for months and months. “It’s laughable but terrifying at the same time,” she said. “They are clowns, politicians. And I chose to come here to this venue as a comment on business leaving Britain. And that’s why you’ll see cuts here that are inside out and back to front. It’s all confused, like what’s going on right here and internationally, too. Playful, but sinister, I’d say.”Fashion-wise she made a strong case for tailored flares and chinos with cargo pockets, three-quarter drape jackets, and concertina-pressed shirts. There were off-proportions gathered from ravers, skinheads, rastas, and disco-goers of yesteryear, cultural notes remade for a young generation to arm itself against disunity. The last word on her press release, in capitals wascoexist.Rose shook her head in conclusion. “You know, I’m not normally a pessimistic person. I’m an optimist. I think, in the end, whatever happens, there are always people. I believe in our relationships. And that’s why I put in my badge ‘Magic Things Ahead.’ ”
10 June 2019
Odds-on, this is possibly the most exciting lookbook fashion men and boys will see this season. Martine Rose—when she speaks, whenever she shows, whenever she doesn’t—there are people all over the place who hang on her every move. The show she staged on a street in north London last summer is now legend in that neighborhood and amongst those who attended from around the globe. “I talked to everyone beforehand, but I didn’t really know how it would go. Then, people started coming out of their houses and setting up chairs in their front gardens with a couple of beers and the odd Pimm’s to watch,” she remembers. “But when the children came out and ran along the street before it started, I knew it was going to be good.”But there was no Martine Rose on London’s men’s Fashion Week schedule this time, and people were wondering where she’d gone. Especially tortured were her youngest followers. “I mean, it’s nothing like the number that Virgil [Abloh] has . . . but I do have people who I can’t believe the level they will go to to get things or find out snippets of information. It’s so sweet, and deeply flattering. And they’re really young, students and teenagers. They’re just really geeky about clothes.”Now, they can be put out of their misery, for Rose is here with her clothes in a showroom in Paris—only showing when she feels like it suits her. “There’s a lot of pressure on designers and brands to outdo themselves every season, so to actually not do something, and being quiet felt like the most radical thing I can do. I really love clothes; I’m so interested in how people wear them, and their cultural meaning. That’s why I decided to really reduce it, be really simple and plain, and concentrate on the clothes, on a top and a bottom.”She makes it sound like nothing—Martine Rose is ridiculously self-effacing—but as cognoscenti will immediately notice, she has performed one of her sick things with proportions and sexuality that is guaranteed to get people staring. It involves being fearless and self-interrogating, this talent for shifting things. She stood by the first look on her rail—a cropped denim jacket with dropped shoulders and the genius touch of press studs outlining the pocket flaps and shoulder seams. “I like it when you look at something, and you don’t know if it’s horrible or it’s actually great. Is it good taste or bad taste?” she laughed. “Me, I don’t even want to be someone with ‘good taste.’”
20 January 2019
There’s something to be said about the sense of joyful—and not trauma-catalyzed, like in the U.S.—communal vignettes coming out of the U.K. lately. Broadscale, we all know: The marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was the spectacle of all spectacles, but it was arguably more enjoyable given the ebullient public inclusion on display (watched, in the end, by nearly 2billionpeople worldwide). Tonight, for Martine Rose’s Spring show, a tiny family street located in a neighborhood called Chalk Farm had a much smaller yet fundamentally similar feeling: Rose staged her runway on a cul-de-sac called St. Leonard’s Square, and its residents were invited to sit with fashion editors and VIPs. One man parked himself in the front row, his three granddaughters giddy at his side, clutching stuffed animals and sitting on the asphalt in an awestruck huddle. Another group drank red wine in their garden, happy to let the scene play out while enjoying the last rays of a warm summer Sunday. Virgil Abloh and Luka Sabbat were there, too. It was eclectic and pleasant to witness. The same can predominantly be said of the clothes. They were—the whole experience was—“a bit of a love letter, really, to London,” said Rose.This designer is right up at the top of menswear’s most influential (note, she has worked with Demna Gvasalia as a consultant on Balenciaga’s men’s line). And her natural élan—she’s incredibly unpretentious—seems to deliver these unicorn items that you’ve never considered, and then, suddenly, consider obsessively. For Spring, this roster ran long: DIY-style jeans with metal O-rings looped down the outer seams; denim-track pant hybrids; really good oddball outerwear like Rose’s signature doctored jackets (leopard and denim, in a vintage-store-find kind of way); and a grossly good Hawaiian shirt series.Rose’s latest may have also been a weather vane pointing toward a more psychedelic, speedier space. A space that’s a little dirtier, in a good way. The ’90s as a trend is not new, but there was a roughened richness, a sense of unboxed nostalgia, that recalled the designer’s musical youth in particular. “The rave scene, drum and bass, U.K. garage . . .” she listed. She also tapped into something slightly earlier: ’80s-era “Wide Boy” culture, with square-toed shoes and big old leather coats. And as “The Only One I Know” by The Charlatans and “Funky Punk” by Dillinger filled the annex, beers in hand and cigarettes swinging, Rose’s intent appeared accomplished.
“We’re all going through a bit of a funny time at the minute, and I think we’re in need of a bit of love.”
10 June 2018
London Men’s Fashion Week, under the jurisdiction of the British Fashion Council, has taken place within strict geographical parameters for five years, but when Martine Rose says, “I’m going to show in Tottenham,” then the fashion people up and go to Tottenham. Their alacrity to be there, several postcodes out of the West End, was proof of how highly regarded this designer is, and not just by a local claque. This time the invitation was to a community climbing gym which the neighborhood is proud of for the way it forms local bonds, and Rose came straight to the point. “I was looking at the Toronto underground scene of the ’80s and ’90s, and then I got interested in the outdoor lifestyle—climbing, golfers, bicycle messengers,” she said. “It was about making the ordinary extraordinary again.”So that was the surprise this time: her lycra cycling shorts and fleeces, on top of which there were wide knee-length khaki shorts with cargo pockets. Rose is one of fashion’s deep sources when it comes to shifting shapes. She it was who pioneered superwide pants, and who last year cut some incredible suits with wide shoulders and high waists. The suits—to the relief of fans—were still there, but with the trouser cut without all the extra wide folded-over volume we saw last season. “I’m still exploring themes of the everyman, and corporate clothing,” she assured people. But there’s no doubt about it: There’s a proportion change around the corner.Rose credited the Canadian photographer Trevor Hughes, who documented the underground electronic music scene, for her styling of large leather bombers and vests with lycra shorts. In the mix was another of her signatures—her ROSE logo, printed onto T-shirts and belt buckles. She’s super skilled at knowing how to make her branding look desirable—her Martine Rose tie-pin from last year caused a huge stir, and was bought by men as well as women. On the runway, there were two women in knee-length pencil skirts with paper-bag waists. “Yes, I do know that women are buying my things,” she smiled. “This one’s specially for them.”
11 June 2017
It was one of the most off-the-beaten-track of all the menswear shows in London or elsewhere: off-schedule, in a Latin community covered street market in Tottenham, on the night of a Tube strike. Yet anyone who made it there saw Martine Rose round up and make polished yet edgy stylistic sense of subjects that have been occupying the menswear fraternity at large. Or as she put it, clothes inspired by “bankers, office workers, and bus drivers.”We should zoom straight in on what might seem minutiae, her ties and tiepins. Perhaps the sort of thing you might see worn by a big band orchestra in the ’50s, filtered through an ’80s New Wave sensibility. Rose started her business concentrating on shirts. This was the first time she came forward with a full-fledged collection, and it was a phenomenal blend of tailoring and the utilitarian, a total silhouette and killer looks with both fashion and believability on its side.The on-point narrow ties with jacquard roses and Martine Rose logo tiepins (especially shown on satin shirts) were somehow the clincher. With her exaggerated shoulders and her wide-leg—sometimes superwide—pants wrapped into belt loops on a high waist, these blokes pulled off a natty swagger. Many designers this season have spoken of subverting archetypal masculine clothes—Rose did, too—but few have dealt with reconstructing the ’80s corporate suit this convincingly. Some of the jackets and trenches were cut away to become halter necks, and a couple of the tucked-in sweaters turned out to be “bodies.” That’s enough innovation to keep the fashion crowd satisfied; Rose’s reference to the movieAmerican Psychowill also give pause for thought to those on the lookout for critical subtext.Yet even with the brilliant New Wave Philip Oakey (The Human League circa 1982) hairdos, this collection didn’t come across as overstyled—the takeaway pieces jumped out. Apart from being a designer who can cut interest into a garment, Rose is also a great colorist, working tonic electric blue, burgundy, lemon, apricot, and red in with her khaki and grays. As an off-schedule, off-piste show, it was one of the best anywhere in London or, in fact, of the whole season. Rose isn’t an overnight star; she is someone who has worked at her vision, brought up her daughter, and taken her time, and that makes it better—the sense that she means it on the professional business level and can deliver on promise.
Why the obscure North London venue—the suburban postcode notorious for being the tinderbox that sparked the London riots in 2011? “Well, I’ve been in Tottenham for years, and it’s been good to me,” Rose said. “So I wanted to bring people here to see a bit of somewhere they’d probably never been. And the folks in this market were so happy and pleased about it.” So were the onlookers—glad to see a collection that resonated with reality and sealed this designer’s reputation.
7 February 2017
Martine Roseis an underground name on the London menswear scene. More likely than not, she won’t be on that schedule—she shows sporadically and unexpectedly. For Spring 2015, for instance, she decided to show a single outfit, summarizing her ideas for the season. For Spring 2017, she had a whole bunch—but the idea was similarly singular. “Old clothes command new owners” was the rather grandiose house line, which translated to clothes with a feel of the second-hand about them, both in their physicality and in the way they were worn.Deriving your inspiration from vintage clothes is old-hat (no pun), but Rose considered those clothes in a detached way. She was thinking about clothes bundled and shipped out for charity, and how signifiers well recognized could be subverted in that trip. Example: the humble soccer jersey. In London, the colors and badges denote affiliations, team colors, territorial divides. Decontextualized, they’re designs to be taken at face-value—shade, shape, fabric. It’s an interesting notion—one Rose explored by reversing logos and badges, leaving merely the online stitching visible of the latter, and the former winding up a decorative motif you wouldn’t immediately recognize as text. The clothes were a jumble—snakeskin jackets over soccer polyester, long cord coats, and craft knits. It didn’t look especially spring-y. “I’ve never really been that preoccupied with seasons,” said Rose—sweating in a seasonally inappropriate leather ensemble as summer finally kicked into London in July.Seasons are the last things on anyone’s minds. We none of us need any more new clothes—that was an undercurrent of the whole Spring 2017 menswear season, where designers tried to offer pertinent arguments as to why guys may need to buy just one more jacket come next year. Perhaps that’s why Rose’s Duchampian repurposing of the already-made struck a chord—particularly as she is far more open than most designers about filching from pre-existing garments. There is also the simple fact that Rose is talented, and has a distinct and discernible aesthetic. Her trademark, influential silhouette—of shrunken, abbreviated torso and pants so widely flared they resemble a skirt—was much in evidence. “I get drawn back to that every season,” said Rose. “I’m often quoted as saying it’s really ’90s—but that’s too simplistic. It reflects a time of growing up. What I remember, and what feels new.
”A word, also, to the format: this time, a lookbook take on Cindy Sherman’s 1976 Bus Riders series—the everyman feel of the images, perfectly observed slices of reality, appealed to Rose, a designer obsessed with the everyday. “It’s based on everyone, in a strange way,” Rose said of her collection. It could easily be worn by them too—and deserves to be, although it won’t. At least, not directly. Rose is a niche name in menswear, but her ideas are fodder for other designers. Look at how wide those wide-legged trousers have spread. Rose wasn’t the first, but she was one of the most insistent. She’s influential, and her clothes deserve an audience, however she decides to show them.
21 July 2016
London-based menswear designer Martine Rose is on her own trip. That's what makes her work such a pleasure—the sense that she's telling a story no one else knows. This season, she delved into her own teenage memories of raving, with a lot of help from the Wild Life Archive, a collection of youth culture errata compiled by Rose's friend Steve Terry. Using Terry's old rave fliers as a jumping-off point, Rose conjured the "low" glamour of the original scene—the shiny shirts, the crusty furs, the baggy pants and anoraks—and exaggerated the look as a means of elevating it. The big faux fur—shaved with a beard trimmer, with embedded fliers—has been a surprise hit, according to Rose. But that makes sense, actually. Even Rose's most fanciful pieces are grounded in a masculine reality that makes them relatable. The same is true of her more challenging silhouettes, like the extra-voluminous denim: They'll look great in editorial, but the look wouldn't strike you as absurd if you encountered it in the street. That's an impressive trick. Martine Rose has been flying under the radar for a while now; here's hoping this is the collection that gets her the buzz she deserves.
20 March 2014