Martine Rose is one of the most sneakily influential designers working today. She helped draw up the menswear blueprint of oversized, intentionally off-kilter tailoring at Balenciaga in a three-year consulting role. At her own brand, she has led fashion’s wave of soccer-inspired kits with clever jersey flips that reflect the football fandom of her London upbringing. And she’s turned square-toed footwear into a most unlikely street style staple, culminating in last year’s release of a boxy Nike Shox slip-on that was the most interesting (or only interesting?) sneaker release of 2022. Rose is frequently cited as a prime candidate for a promotion to the helm of a luxury house because she’s been out in front of so many men’s fashion moments, big and small.
Last night in Florence, an eager crowd gathered in a 16th-century covered market to see where Rose would take us next. (For those keeping track of intramural industry friendships, guests included Ferragamo’s Maximilian Davis, Hood By Air co-founder Shayne Oliver, and Awake’s Angelo Baque; ex-Bottega Veneta and current Burberry creative director Daniel Lee attended the afterparty at a local disco club.)
After a pre-show aperitivo courtesy of a nearby family restaurant, the audience took their seats as a crowd of locals looked on from the square outside. A procession of street cast models, some plucked from the cafes and trattorias in the vicinity of the venue, stomped out wearing looks that might have felt familiar to many of them. As the Pitti Uomo guest designer this season, Rose said she wanted her first collection shown outside her hometown to feel like a “real collaboration of Italy and London together.” Florence is most well-known as a spiritual hub of men’s tailoring, and an actual hub of leather goods, but what makes the city a true style destination is how regular Florentine citizens dress. It’s a truly heady mix, where lush cable knit sweaters, graphic nylon track jackets, expensive tailored overcoats, and aughts-era distressed denim exist in funky harmony, and always with loads of gold jewelry layered on top. Rose is keenly interested in the workaday clothing of regular people, which she twists into silhouettes plucked from the nightclub lineup. So these Florentine garments contained dramatic proportions: one black wool car coat rode up to a model’s ears, thanks to aggressive shoulder padding that brought to mind Rose’s impactful work at Balenciaga. “I always like things that feel familiar but feel slightly off, also,” she told a group of journalists after the show. She also introduced at least one garment with serious viral potential: stonewashed jeans featured perilously low, ass crack-exposing rises. “Very naughty!” Rose acknowledged with a laugh. “I definitely wanted a sense of sexiness and sort of cheekiness and fun. Literal cheekiness.”
(Pitti Uomo headliners are expected to reference the history of Florence and pour on the Italian-made tailoring for their special collections. According to the show notes, the jeans do in fact connect back to the Renaissance. When Michelangelo was sculpting David, debtors were receiving “public bum-spankings” on the site of the show venue.)
Rose, unafraid to blend references, folded in a seam of spaghetti western-wear, too: some of those cheesy windbreaker jackets and boxy wool overcoats had waves of fringe flowing off the back, turning the quotidian into the stuff of Italo Disco star power. Bulbous clown-toe derbies—one of Rose’s favorite new designs, she said—expanded her lexicon of exaggerated footwear.
Twisting the uniforms of normal people into runway fashion is a tightrope walk. It can easily veer into dystopia, magnifying the distressing realities of life that clothing can so clearly convey. But Rose’s collections have a much more lighthearted spin: they’re more extreme, for sure, but in a kinky, and occasionally very humorous, in a butt crack-exposing, western fringe-on-an-overcoat kind of way. Rose used the word “fun” a few times to explain those design choices. Over the years, Rose’s distorted designs have been perceived as trollish or intimidatingly cool, but she’s really in the business of creating surprise and delight and a little drama. She might make clothes for the nightclub set, but hers isn’t an exclusionary crowd. It’s a profoundly refreshing approach, and within minutes of the finale, members of the audience—flush with optimism and Aperol spritz—were already discussing the odds that Rose ends up at Louis Vuitton, or maybe even back at Balenciaga. The message being that the upper echelons of luxury fashion could use Rose’s open spirit, foresight, and ability to tease excitement out of the everyday.
Backstage, the eternally unpretentious Rose, holding one of her children on her hip (a good reminder that she’s one of very few moms among the menswear designer ranks), thanked the locals who walked in the show. “I’m so proud of the cast, many of them had never done [this] before. And they really gave energy and I think paid tribute to Florence in a way that I hoped,” she said. A few minutes later, I ran into one of them, a gentleman with gray hair named Luigi, standing around outside. His hair was sharply slicked back, and he was still wearing the fringed jacket, leather pants, and silk shirt-and-tie from the show. He appeared to fall squarely in the category of cast members who had never walked in a fashion show before. When I offered my congratulations, Luigi shrugged, before flashing a satisfied smile. Another newly-minted Martine Rose fan.