Martine Rose – The Summer 2025 Issue13 Images
Back in the foreboding days of January 2020, I found myself backstage at a Martine Rose show. The location alone would be enough to tell you that Rose is a designer who enjoys a bit of social chaos. The event was not taking place in a draughty faux warehouse in Clerkenwell, or a grand Mayfair ballroom, but at a primary school in the backstreets of Kentish Town. Alongside all the Vogue writers, style bloggers and creative directors were the parents, teachers, pupils and cleaning staff of the school which Rose’s daughter was enrolled at. It all felt strangely municipal and egalitarian, more like a community fundraiser than a fashion bash.
The show was just one instalment of Martine Rose’s alternative guide to London. Brands love to ‘pay homage’ to their home cities, but when Rose does London, the city reveals itself very differently to Chanel’s Paris (tweed suits, Vanessa Paradis, the Grand Palais) or Burberry’s London (scruffy terriers, Richard E Grant, Primrose Hill in the rain). Hers is a world of cruising saunas, community centres, indoor markets and Camden cul-de-sacs. While many designers run towards a generic global luxury market as success looms, Rose digs further and further into the edges and innards of her hometown. Her London is one that is very much recognisable to the people who live here, but twisted, heightened, eroticised.
“I’m not really interested in the shiny, big landmarks of London,” she explains in the build-up to her SS26 show in June, which will take place at an as-yet undisclosed venue. “I hadn’t really thought about it as a whole before… but the show locations tend to be places where people gather, where they can find people they identify with.” So what are her own landmarks? The ones that anchor her memories of the city? “There are so many. There’s Brixton Recreation Centre, when I was young. There’s Strawberry Sundae in Vauxhall, the first club I went to… a lot of shopping centres.”
Rose’s lore is well-known in the fashion world, and her atypical journey remains a point of obsession for journalists. She was born in the early 80s to a family of Jamaican heritage, growing up in what would have been mid-Claphamification Clapham. She first launched her brand back in 2007 – the days of Henry Holland and Agyness Deyn dancing to The Teenagers at Bungalow 8 – but continued to work in a bar well into her 30s.
In 2015, while she was living in temporary accommodation with her first child, Demna Gvasalia earmarked her as a collaborator for his takeover of Balenciaga. Since then, her star has burned steadily while so many others have collapsed in a blaze of ego and over-expansion. Her innately genderless designs call on streetwear, formalwear and clubwear – part charity shop chaos and part Berwick Street chic. Whenever a new micro-trend like ‘blokecore’, ‘dadcore’, vintage football shirts, or racing jackets explodes on fashion TikTok – there’s a chance it looks a lot like a Martin Rose collection. Timothée Chalamet is a big fan, and Tyler, The Creator accepted a Grammy in one of her jackets.
I wonder if she feels lucky, not just with the timing and longevity of her career, but building her brand in a slightly less cutthroat London? “Yes and no,” she considers. “I think some things were definitely easier. Success has to be fast now, so I feel like I had the luxury of time. It was also a lot easier to start a business pre-Brexit. We didn’t have the same level of social media, so it happened at a much more traditional, much slower pace. But now it’s so much easier to promote yourself, to get noticed.”
Laura Dooley, her long-time PR, remembers the early days well: “We didn’t have the budget to put on shows, so we created lookbooks, and we did things off-schedule,” she recounts. “There was one season where Martine didn’t have enough money to create a whole collection, so she created just one look and said, ‘Laura, do you think I’m mad? ’I replied, ‘Absolutely not, I think it’s the best PR story ever.’ That single look she created then went around the world. It was a really great moment. Some PR’s might have thought I was mad at the time, but now it’s become a normal way of performing or communicating for brands. I’ve never questioned her decisions.”
Alongside Dooley, Martine calls upon a close network of collaborators – many of whom have been there since day one – eschewing many brands’ habit of always seeking out the hyper-new and fleetingly hot. Brand stylist (and best friend) Tamara Rothstein, explains their unusually close relationship: “I met Martine at Camberwell College of Art in 1998,” she recalls. “She was cool… and I was out of my depth. Not much has changed really. We all know each other inside out, know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We know how to support each other, and bring the best out of each other.”
I’m lucky enough to work with my best friends. They know exactly the mood I’m looking for. They fundamentally get what I’m trying to achieve – Martine Rose
“Most of the people that I’ve worked with are people that I’ve worked with from the very, very, beginning of my career,” adds Martine. “I’m lucky enough to work with my best friends. They know exactly the mood I’m looking for. They fundamentally get what I’m trying to achieve, so there’s very little time spent trying to get people onboard. But, I also work with new people all the time, who inject this new dynamic in – a revolving door of newness and fun. So it’s the best of both worlds.”
Backstage at that show in 2020, I couldn’t help but notice an unusually familial atmosphere at play. Some of Martine’s team had brought their partners and children along, and this ethos seemed to extend to the show’s models, a cast that ranged from street-cast teenagers treading the runway for the first time, to veteran club scene faces. The boys in particular stood out. These were not ketosis-riddled, Storm-signed professionals, looksmaxxing in the toilets, but awkward young rascals, joshing each other in the styling queue and squirming when they had make-up applied.
“The process of the casting is quite interesting,” explains Martine. “I imagine it’s quite unusual. It’s about who the person is, in addition to what they look like. A lot of them have never walked before, and are unfamiliar with the process. So it’s really important that you build relationships with them. It’s a trust thing – you’re encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone. When the magic happens, is the moment when they start to believe you, when they see the whole thing come together. You can see the change. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until the day of the show, but it always happens, and it’s amazing.”
Casting director Isabel Bush – who first started working with the brand when she was a Martine Rose model herself, and brought down a bunch of her skateboarder friends to fill out the cast – further explains the process: “There is always complexity to the person, a certain swagger, something that goes beyond their look. It needs to feel as though they embody the clothes, and there’s something believable in their character.”
Aside from ‘London’, the other word that follows Martine around is ‘subculture.’ And for her, those two obsessions are very much entwined. “Subculture and youth culture are intrinsic to London in a way that it isn’t in other European cities. They’re very authentically connected. London has always fostered youth culture, whereas Europe is more conservative.”
So what does she think about the current state of subculture, where long-standing style tribes are jammed together and regurgitated across nano trends like ‘Hedi Boys’ and jerk rap kids in Hot Topic gear? “I think we just have lots of imagery,” she mulls. “We can mine the past, the present and the future simultaneously. So it’s inevitable that everything is going to come together in a blob. I feel like you have to hunt harder to find your little subsect. There’s almost so much to focus on, that you need to tune out a little and become a bit more singular, but it’s all still so rich.”
Rose is clearly interested in matters beyond the confines of high fashion, and I note something she said in a recent podcast: “The designers I’m interested in are the ones who infiltrated culture.” I ask her to elaborate on this: “I suppose catwalk designers were doing something different to my own experience, how I grew up. But the ones I did pay attention to were the ones like JPG, like Versace, Moschino, Iceberg. They all had diffusion lines that were co-opted by music tribes. I started to see those labels crop in the circles around me, whereas a lot of luxury brands didn’t.” And what does she think of the relationship between fashion and wider culture right now? “I think they’re pretty inseparable. I think they’re closer together than they’ve ever been before. There’s been a whole shift.”
I wonder if she feels embraced by the establishment at this point, or does she still feel like a nonconformist? “I don’t know… I think it’s possible to feel like both,” she says. “I’ve been doing this for a really long time, but it doesn’t mean I don’t get the same excitement, the same thrill, for the same fears and anxieties that I did 20years ago. I’m still keen to tell these stories. I also don’t want to get stuck into a really safe groove where I’m just churning out stuff which I know works.”
For my own brand, there is a certain set of non-negotiables. For me to stay engaged [at a major fashion house], there would have to be certain things I wouldn’t compromise on – Martine Rose
But despite Martine’s assertion that she’s happy where she is, there is an elephant in the room throughout the interview. For years now, there have been whispers about Martine taking over a major fashion house, just as British designers from Alexander McQueen to Phoebe Philo to Daniel Lee have done before her. Obviously, she is guarded on this subject, but if it were to happen, how much of her process, her vision, is she willing to concede for the opportunity?
Her answer is unusually open-ended: “Hypothetically speaking, I’d do what is best for the project that I’m working on. For my own brand, there is a certain set of non-negotiables. For me to stay engaged, there would have to be certain things I wouldn’t compromise on, like a certain amount of street casting. But you know, I guess it depends. It’s really hypothetical.”
But no doubt, she has ambitions that may outgrow the current model: “I want to show more facets of myself, I hate the idea of being pigeon-holed. The challenge is to constantly show something new. We love to put people in boxes, it makes us feel better, but I need to make sure I’m jumping out of them all the time. Even though I’ve been doing this for a really long time, I still have so many ideas about new things and what we can do. The future is complex and rich.”
Like all Londoners, Martine seems to have a healthy level of contempt for the business she works in – but also a tendency to mythologise the city she can’t quite let go of. In the days after our conversation, I kept thinking back to the show at the primary school, and the version of London it seemed to aspire to. In a time in which the Farage-sphere is so keen to write off the capital as an open sewer of Uber Eats convoys, supercar burn-ups and phone snatches, Martine appears to be a real believer in the capital; not an apologist, but a kind of romantic ambassador. But perhaps, as any London-dweller will attest, the lure of quieter, greener pastures is always out there.
