“Sometimes you need a circuit-break,” smiled Martine Rose. “And anyway, I’m known for that.” In London, she was talking over her decision to shoot a lookbook rather than staging a show this season. Although that may be a bit of a letdown for all and sundry who revel in the special frisson her shows generate, Rose is loved and venerated for the way she sails past industry expectations. There’s no let-up in the “sexy weird outsiders” content she’s conjured this season, mind you. It’s as subversive, funny, and disconcertingly unaccountable as you could wish for in this time of creative fashion desertification.
“I think that I always want to break down the formality and pretension of clothes, somehow,” she said. “There’s a playfulness, a freedom of expression I yearn for. A feeling you should be who you want to be. I feel that’s more essential than ever now. Because it can all feel so boring.”
The penile nose prosthetics popped up again from their first airing on the Milanese runway last season. This time they are accompanied by Y-front underwear on women, and various suggestive duo-scenarios. “I’ve always been interested in finding beauty in the cracks and the crevices of culture. After having those shows where people were relatable and familiar, I wanted to ask: Can I distort someone’s traditional beauty and still find them sexy? And actually I can.” Her press release added lines on her “study of the relationship between human attraction and abnormality” and “the search for uncharted sexuality.”
Part of that search is through memory: Rose’s nostalgia for the London indie fashion markets of the 1970s and ’80s that purveyed club-wear, fetish-wear, army-surplus clothing, and stuff knocked up by young designers for cash on a weekly basis. Kensington Market and Sign of the Times were haunts she just caught the tail end of as a child. Her collection is a part-celebration of those “market traders” whose modus operandi was serving sub-cults with MA-1 flight jackets, hippy jeans, raver t-shirts, and the like.
Thus, a pair of fringed, tiered suede jeans turns up. A lot of patchworked shirts and knitwear redolent of the make-do ethos that held the origins of upcycling, before anyone called it that. And, because this is Rose, a very clever designer of the 2020s, there are her hybrids: bum-bags implanted and integrated into garments to create new silhouettes.
She’s built them into the sleeve-heads of an army parka, creating a permanent big-shoulder swagger, into a mean-chic belt wrapping a black leather trench coat—and, brilliantly, as external bra-line pockets on workwear shirts and a leather corset. Meanwhile, her accessories are a cult of her own: her bulb-nosed loafers, Nike collabs, and this season an oh-so-genius series of headgear fusions of parka hoods and baseball caps, and hoodies (just the hood) with peaked caps. “What can I say?” she laughed. “It’s very me.”
