When Martine Rose shows in London, it is a big community and you can bet that the location she chooses will make a point. This time she let us stand in line in a track center in Lisson Grove, that she had taken over from the glorification of market traders, the locals who have done their own type of job creation in the margins for generations. “They are the kind of unseen people that is part of the structural of London’s cultural life,” she said. “Small independent designers, vintage sellers, record stores, jewelry makers, hairdressers.”
Participation in supporting the London fashion-stall holders in Shamolic Times (a movement without a permanent residence but millions of creative ideas), Rose invited 22 traders to occupy a floor of the semi-exclusion building that she had hired. “It felt like a wonderful opportunity to celebrate them a little, and not to make it about me.”
But again, Naturally It was all about Martine Rose. Opening to a higher floor we came to the rooms that were draped in white swagged and surrounded curtains, waiting for what she was doing. “It’s our kind of salon show,” she argued, although there was already something clear kinky about the smothering curtains. The subculture and the off-off ‘normal’ run in something that we have never seen before is Rose’s super power. She shocks and shifts silhouettes in ways that are taken over in the vernacular. In 2013 – all those years ago – she was the first to do too big forms and now watches where we are.
So in this collection she works exactly on the opposite: clothing that is tight and pulled into the body. “I think we have exploring new adapted, contemporary ideas about the modern sexual area this season,” she said, “so we created this kind of suction and tightness in strange places, which is really exciting.” Probably the clearest example is her view of a checkered shirt: a sleek front mini dress with the shirt with seamless on the back. Or all the front, layered skirts with their light -switching kilt folds on the back.
It is also everywhere on the men’s clothing: squeezing the pants of the electricians, shrinking, shrinking leather Harrington jackets, streamlining the Martine Rose-Branded Tracks exploits to make it lean as possible, without turning into megings. Where there were larger forms-apparent poncho’s bleaches to be the greeting of Rose for hairdressing caps (and therefore short in the back), a familiar face in the shopping in every neighborhood in London.
Distinguishing of all this, we saw Rose on the way to her usual suggestive tricks, broadcasting frilly aprons with waist, lingerie-installed checked boxers and bags draped in texts discontinued from vintage adult magazine Personal advertisements. The hair-large, long head-banger Manes and the strange tight permanent head-of-headed another ingenious British reference layer by Rose’s hairdresser Gary Gill.
If they hit agreements from the 60s, 70s or 80s, that is exactly what Rose’s ideas bound to her first visits to Kensington Market as a child. It was a basement full of stalls that focus on hippies, metal competitions, ravers, punks and goten. Lemmy van Motorhead claimed to have sold Dope there, and the legend has that Freddie Mercury worked on a stall that was run by Roger Taylor before they were queen.
“So all this,” Rose sighed, which means both the collection and the wider event, “is our tribute to the Kensington market. Many people started there – it was a serious part of the subcultural scene of London: a place to meet, a place to find fashion, to discover who you are and now we want that kind”