Martine Rose has long treated her namesake label as a love letter to London. She bases her collections on the weird and wonderful characters who give the city its quirks, inviting the fashion pack to immerse themselves in her world: be it staging shows in Seven Sisters Market, North London cul-de-sacs, and even her own daughter’s primary school in Kentish Town.
What would happen, then, when she ventured to foreign soil? “I’m very interested in something about ordinariness and everydayness,” explains Rose in an early morning preview of her AW23 collection in Florence. She is this year’s guest designer at the famed men’s trade show Pitti Uomo, a privilege previously bestowed on the likes of JW Anderson, Wales Bonner and Craig Green.
It’s Rose’s first time showing outside of the Big Smoke. She admits that although the beautiful backdrop of Florence is enough reason to warrant staging her collection here, “I wanted to engrain myself and interact with the city in a real way,” she says.
“When I was first invited to show at Pitti, my first question to myself was ‘how can I do what I do in London and transport it into Florence?’ And what I wanted to do instinctively was to really respond to the culture and the history of Florence and Italy.”
The designer chose Piazza del Mercato Nuovo as the show’s venue, a market place that has been at the centre of the city since the mid-1500s. Home to Fontana del Porcellino – a bronze boar statue that has long served as Florence’s good luck charm – as well as being the spot where public spankings over unpaid debts would take place during the Renaissance, today it’s an area populated with tourist stalls swarmed with I Love Italy hoodies, dupe handbags and Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”, now in fridge magnet form.
Time again, Rose has mined UK dancefloors, and subcultures born under strobe lights, for inspiration. From acid housers, junglists, and gabber ravers, to the Blitz Kids and style tribes found in the seedy dark rooms of London’s most infamous queer club nights. Here, she pointed her focus on Italo Disco and Bologna New Wave, transforming the market into a louche Italian nightclub lined with mirrors and carpeted a suspicious yellow hue. Her dancefloor darlings were made up of streetcast locals, friends from London and calcio storico sporting legends. (If you’re unaware, calcio storico is a brutal form of football played topless, and during the Middle Ages, on cobblestones – ouch).
Relishing in all things warped and wonky, Rose playfully disjointed classic Italian tailoring, shrinking and swelling proportions. From disguising “BuyOneGetOneFree” jumpsuits as two-piece suits, to cheekily proposing office trousers as bumsters. Business in the front, party in the back. Full on. Full throttle.
Bombers and overcoats came with stiffened, exaugurated collars that grazed models’ ears, and were met with wadded plaid shirts, Western-style fringing, and boiled merino wool sweater vests that appeared to be frozen in place. Rose has been studying dolls’ clothing, imagining what the rigid ensembles would look like human-sized. One bubblegum pink puffer jacket – stuffed to the brim, drenched with sugary sweet faux fur – could’ve easily dressed Barbie if she’d sold off the Dreamhouse, took a load of E, and spent her days chasing euphoric bliss out on the tiles.
Anchored by Rose’s beloved square-toe loafers and a colourful update of the designer’s Nike MR4 trainer mule – later this year Rose will release a tailoring capsule with the sportswear giant – as well as sporting holdalls repurposed as lady’s handbags, this season’s look subverted masculine and feminine archetypes with a wink and a nudge. Rose’s curiosity about how we dress, day-to-day, holds the power to paint normality in the most spectacular light.
Photography courtesy of Martine Rose.
