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.
Martine Rose, spring 2019 menswear
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigital.tv
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.
