Save this story Save Story Save this story It’s major news that Martine Rose has been announced as Creative Director title at Balenciaga. Despite the fact that internet speculation over her appointment as successor to Pierpaolo Piccioli has run rife in the past weeks, long experience tells that, much like election results, it’s never real until it’s official.
The joy and relief felt by Rose’s very long-term fans might well be compared to the sensation Democrat-leaning voters are feeling at the midterm results in the US. She’s a designer’s designer, a champion of subcultures and outsiders, a woman whose huge influence as a shaper and shifter of fashion couldn’t be be more respected—and yet who’s never been tapped for a position at the top of luxury fashion since she started out as an independent London designer in 2002. This has nothing to do with the out-going designer at Balenciaga. It’s the fact that the furious wait and the endless hopes held out for Rose’s talent to be recognized and empowered in the constellation of luxury fashion has gone on far, far too long.
But now that it’s Balenciaga that finally came calling it couldn’t feel more right—not least because the Jamaican-British 46-year-old heroine of elevated street-style arrives as no stranger. It was back in 2015 that Demna, a long-distance fan who’d discovered her first presentations on the internet, hired Rose as a consultant when he was inaugurating the first Balenciaga menswear collections. I recognized her there from her low-key London shows, smilingly egging Demna on in her quiet way behind the scenes while I was working on a Vogue feature about him.
They conspired eye-to-eye on what Rose later described to me as her “observational” way of designing: looking at real life and exaggerating or twisting garments so that the familiar becomes desirable and slyly coded all over again.
At the time, Demna’s Balenciaga menswear became a massive (pun intended) hit, with its XXXL tailoring, gigantic parkas, humungous trainers, and various satirizations of unraveling corporate manhood, untucked shirts, desperate neckties, and all. As this formed the basis of the Balenciaga brand attraction that drew young shoppers around the world, it makes sense that Rose could be the woman with the insight and instincts to drive it forward now.
“I really love clothes. I’m so interested in how people wear them, and their cultural meaning,” she once told me, after one of the typically sporadic, hyper-local shows she’s been drawing audiences to in London with her own Martine Rose brand. Famed for showing on a neighborhood square in Chalk Farm for spring 2019 (Virgil Abloh came to applaud), at her daughter’s junior school in fall 2020, and most recently in a market stall scenario she’d set up in a disused Job Centre, Rose’s ethos is a unique hybrid of joyful community warmth and hardcore subversion. One of the jacquards she had woven into some of her ‘School’ collection read “Tottenham, Croydon, Clapham Junction, Tooting”—all the London boroughs she and her extended family have lived in since she was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Honoring the Jamaican family I come from” is a point of pride in her work, not to mention the encyclopedic enjoyment she takes in all the subcultures and club cultures she and her elder siblings grew up around, everything from football casuals to rave, reggae, queer culture, underground fetish, and references to club flyers or Jamaican home furnishings.
Abetted by Tamara Rothstein, her stylist friend with whom she first set up a short-lived t-shirt line, LMNOP, in 2002, Rose’s tweaks in proportions have proved so prophetic that, looking back, some of her early collections, thought to be weird at the time, now look nearly regular. In fall 2019 she remembered the reaction to her first oversized clothes. “It’s so funny,” she laughed.” When I first did this shape in spring 2013, people were like, ‘ugh, what is that’?” Simply, it became what all of us wore, and largely still do, thanks to her.
Some may ask if Rose can do womenswear and accessories. “I love playing with gender lines. I find it very sexy—a woman in men’s clothes, a man in women’s clothes,” she once told me. Her multi-generational family of favorite models bears this out. Models in Rose’s own age group have lately been commanding a powerful kind of runway sisterhood. Balenciaga—no, the whole of fashion—could definitely benefit from seeing more of that right now.
As for accessories? One only need to look shoe-ward to see what Rose has already done: her spring-heeled Nike Shox MR4 trainers are widely popular and there’s no discounting the influence of her box-toed loafers and sharp elongated pumps. All the above is a bit of an outline of the experience and joie de vivre Martine Rose brings to the party. In a time when fashion has gone a bit tame and quiet, it’s exciting to think what a woman like this will do with a free rein and such a generous feeling for human self-expression.
Source: Lifestyle
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