Presented at the Job Centre in Lisson Grove, Martine Rose’s latest collection dips back, as usual, into a time and culture that likely hasn’t gotten its fashionable due. And then she spins, twists, squeezes out of it what even the most subversive designers struggle to achieve in equal measures coolness and finesse. The looks are tongue-in-cheek, and yet their contexts are most sincere.
This season, such styles drew from the market traders who have shaped or even lie at the heart of London’s artistic vibrancy. That great variety of vendors you’ll see in any city, especially around this time of year: craftspeople, dressmakers and soap sellers, decorative artists, braiders, home goods dealers, all creative retailers.
Opening the collection was a mostly black look featuring a close-fitted, waxy leather jacket slipped over a lustrous gold blouse, paired with slim trousers held up by a circular-buckled belt. Some shoes had a low block heel and resembled some mixture of a tennis shoe, water shoes, and a loafer. A sneaker mule? The punches we expect in a Martine Rose show, the head turners, were best shown in puffy, waist-cinching blazers: one specked and in deep charcoal, the other patterned in thicker stripes in the lower half than in the upper; a frilly flounce skirt atop graphic printed trousers; in bodily supplements such as a thigh tattoo that read “so good” on one of the women models. Of course, one sees that and thinks of James Brown’s most famous song, “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and connects it to the model’s hairdressing, which gives the impression of Brown’s cosmetic perfection but in the style of Rick James. Others looked fresh off a pair of hair rollers.
Notably, tees, tanks, jerseys and polos bore text that said “Expect Perfection,” “Everything Must Change,” and “Total Participation.” Paired with the latter were a colorful pair of pants, the right leg hem tucked underneath the tongue of her signature square-toed loafers which had a little gloss and squish. Rose is one of those designers who, like Marni, Prada, or any brand led by a designer with a fresh eye, has her own sense of color. A chartreuse, zipper-pocket-breasted tee pushed into sparkly, dark grey trousers, accessorized by a shiny maroon belt and a turquoise bag, for example. Or embossed cognac pants and a rusty black shacket brightened and slightly discomforted by a rose pink silk bag.
Our grandparents would’ve worn all this in their day, and had a ball while they were at it. It’s an energy I think Martine Rose so marvelously captures in her shows. They look fun, like a cultural homecoming. As though no one will look at you sideways for dancing to the music playing. The clothes, it appears, might even invite you to.
It was in the mid-late 20th century that men would, say, sport the short shorts the models in this show wore with less inhibition than men now. This brings me to the fact that Martine Rose is fashion’s great questioner, resister, and revisor of masculine expression. As a result of her Caribbean background and thinking more and more about what constitutes appropriate menswear outside the rather rigid walls of the global West, she understands the need to expand them. Her genius, part of it, is that she does so organically.