January 12, 2021 |
Ever wondered what Drake gets up to when he’s all alone in his recording studio?
This season, Martine Rose skipped the catwalk and stayed clear of doing any sort of lookbook scenario. She instead built her own virtual block of flats, with the help of design network International Magic, which has been close to a year in the making. The viewer is flown around the simulated apartment complex – dotted with bits of greenery and relics of the brand’s past – on a URL drone, which takes you from door-to-door. Behind each is a new participant, from an entirely different location to their neighbour, who each go about their day.
Rose called the experience What We Do All Day: a fly-on-the-wall view into the lives of 24 people from across the globe. There’s yoga-mad John in LA, young dad Vince and his daughter in London and the ever so slick Violet and YLow in Tokyo. There’s also Mark in Wallhausen, Germany, who parades bare-arsed in a thong before slipping into a leather skirt and sheer footy socks, paired with a negligee worn under your bog-standard office shirt.
The delightful cast all wear signature styles Rose is known and loved for, pulled from the designer’s SS21 collection. Chunky, square-toed loafers are de rigueur (a family in Palestine all wear a pair to play video games in), as are oversised shirts, bleached trackies and cool denim – seen modelled by Max and Mariya, a couple from Moscow who are into some serious yo-yoing.
And this block of flats is never short of surprises. Not only is Kenyan meme queen, Elsa Majimbo, pictured doing a spot of magazine browsing in some snazzy trousers, but Drizzy Drake pops up from in his Toronto studio, showing off his newly-trimmed, heart-shaped barnet whilst wearing a sporty grey twinset.
You could say this is every curtain twitcher’s wet dream, a bit voyeuristic almost. But as we enter the second week of the UK’s third national lockdown, What We Do All Day is a sweet and tender taste for normality. Sometimes you just need to see a mother braiding her daughter’s hair, or a family arguing over the telly, or even someone – in this case Big Youth – dancing alone to reggae tunes, to remember that we’re all going through this fairly odd moment in time together.
If you didn’t catch it, there will be two more showings of the project today at 3pm and 8pm, before it’s gone forever. You could say the whole thing’s a bit like Big Brother before Sky+ was invented. Just now with better clobber.
Photography courtesy of Martine Rose.
