Martine Rose

“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.

Her interest in ‘pulling’ cloth against the body also led her to liking the look of a tightened torso—trench-coats tightly belted a little too high, MA-I bombers narrowed and cropped in the body, but with ‘normal’ sleeves. That’s the kind of shape-shifting desire Rose can create in proportions. It might evolve from capturing a gesture and studying eroticism and fetishism, but voila: Here’s a new set of flattering, semi-shrunken proportions to get avant-garde adopters running.

Rose was early in on the oversizing of men’s fashion that swept the industry; she was at Demna Gvasalia’s side as a consultant when he first established menswear at Balenciaga with all its tendency to XXXL volumes. She’s continuing with her roomy-jacketed suit for spring, but is angling her tailoring towards women as well. A big tweed coat thrown over a tiny satin club dress was the women’s version, to start with.

The air of ‘caught in the act’—or just after—transpired when the dresses (again runkled-up at hip-level) turned out to be half-undone at the back, the zippers apparently stuck in haste. Rose is also feeling like narrowing down women’s tailoring now. Slim ‘back to front’ black jackets—effectively tunics over drainpipe trousers—don’t show up well in photos against the dark background, but in real life, they looked like an answer to the prayers of the large constituency of women who are longing for some kind of comeback of minimalism. “I’ve never really thought of these sort of clean lines for women,” Rose pondered over it, but did it anyway.

Following her instinct for what feels right, plus the ‘micro’ attention she pays to making her ideas work and fit—these are the qualities that make Martine Rose so influential. Her commercial flair in creating an entire wearable wardrobe was fully on display, as was her brilliant, funny tweak to the design of her Nike-collab trainers. The uppers were cut as mules, and the shocks (the hi-tech generic springs seen on every sole these days) transformed to become high heels. It takes a bit of a genius to look at something that commonplace, that functional, and turn it into a high-fashion object like that.

This kind of talent is gold-dust. Presumably that’s why Michael Burke, CEO of Louis Vuitton, had come from Paris to view Rose’s show firsthand. There is a menswear creative director vacancy at the house following the tragic passing of Virgil Abloh. After this unlikeliest French-British assignation to have taken place under the arches at Vauxhall, is Rose on her way to filling it?