Created by Martine Rose in her current role as Guest Creative Director of Clarks, Spring-Summer 2024 previews two styles from the collection Coming Up Roses by Martine Rose for Clarks: a men’s Oxford and a women’s heeled loafer, both featured in black leather or mock-exotics.
Before every area had its own discotheque, community centres were the beating hearts of British nightlife. In the 1970s and early ‘80s, young people would descend upon their local workingman’s hubs and transform their familiar frames into makeshift nightclubs. Invigorated by the era’s waves of immigration, every community centre took on a different character, brought to life by multi-cultural and subcultural youths of diverse expressions. For Spring-Summer 2024, Martine Rose evokes the unique ambience of the community centre by night in a show presented within St Joseph’s Parish Centre near her Crouch Hill studio. Largely unchanged in appearance over the decades, the grounded surroundings of the space integrate its guests and the collection in a symbiosis distinct to the atmosphere of this local but universal institution.
The image of the community centre and its inhabitants is reflected in a dialogue between tradition and change: a re-contextualisation of classic silhouettes, materials and tropes created through the displacement of volumes. The bourgeois A-line of the formal mid-century women’s wardrobe is appropriated in the circular cut of archetypical men’s garments in rugged fabrications. A field jacket, a mac and a safety jacket with normalised shoulders elongate and expand in volume for dramatic movement, a kick echoed in graphic track jackets cut in the memory of the Queen Mum. The ladylike sentiment is reflected in knitted monofilament twin-sets rendered in domestic floral motifs, micro-crocheted vests, and tailoring constructed in swirly granny jacquard towelling in pale shell pink.
Created by Martine Rose in her current role as Guest Creative Director of Clarks, Spring-Summer 2024 previews two styles from the collection Coming Up Roses by Martine Rose for Clarks: a men’s Oxford and a women’s heeled loafer, both featured in black leather or mock-exotics.
In a collaboration with the interdisciplinary artist and designer Yaz XL, colourful ear cuffs in ostrich plume and mohair embellish the boudoir undertones of the collection. They feature alongside earrings and rings by the New York City-based jeweller LL, LLC. Created in the image of matchsticks - burnt or unburnt - the brass and enamel pieces are forged in the jeweller’s signature spiral motif, looping and coiling around fingers, wrists and ears. Finally, pearl necklaces and chokers cement the collection’s appropriation of the bourgeois lady wardrobe.
