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?
