Martine Rose Is Ready for Some Drama

The British designer decamps for Italy’s Pitti Uomo menswear festival and finds a new sense of sensuality, glamor, and beauty in her collection

“I find beauty in things that are easy to not find beauty in,” says Martine Rose, “things that are easy to dismiss.” It might seem hard to find anything not-so-beautiful in Florence, Italy, where Rose presented her Fall 2023 collection on Thursday night as a guest of the biannual Pitti Uomo menswear festival, but Rose’s defining quality as a designer is her curiosity. “I am interested in the everyday, and I really do see the beauty in everyday things and everyday people,” she continued. “I like layered, layered references.”

Rather than post up at Pitti Uomo and fall into Italianate tropes, she set her eye on the strange, special details that define Italian culture and introduced them to her classically British wit. “Even though I started working on the collection before I was invited [to show at Pitti Uomo], once I was invited, of course tailoring started to influence me,” she says. “But I didn’t really alter the collection for Italy or for Pitti Uomo.” Instead she let the idea of arriving in the land defined by the Medici’s indulgences “influence my feeling.”

That feeling is a new one in the Martine Rose multiverse: drama. Not drama in the horny, illicit way, like her last runway show with its latex blazers; nor drama in the wholesome, childlike way, as evoked by a previous show presented on a cul-de-sac in the small London neighborhood Chalk Farm. On Thursday night, the audience enjoyed drama in its campiest, most glamorous Italianate style.The drama came through in the venue, a Medici-funded loggia covered in marble statuary that Rose accentuated with mirrored walls. It came through in the music: retro Italian club jams that had the local audience smiling and dancing in their chairs as models strutted about. And it came through in the vibrating excitement in the air, as onlookers from around Florence clung to metal guardrails to catch a glimpse of Rose’s exquisite mash up of serious shearlings, groovy dad neckties, and her second-skin sport jerseys. “I think the drama and the feeling of this space makes [the collection] feel bigger,” she says.That magnitude is a result not only of the scale of Thursday night’s event, but also the thoroughness of Rose’s design vision. Rather than synthesize her collection into one easily definable mood, she cycled through obsessions, ideas, and silhouettes with remarkable fluency.

Rose’s designs are so outstanding—the kind of stuff that really gets the blood flowing—because of this apparent randomness. Only at her shows do you find a resplendently tailored, rope-shoulder blazer alongside bulbous rubbery boots that look almost like clown shoes. Only she could make a Pepto-pink coat evocative of Cam’ron feel at home beside some of the slinkiest, silkiest, corpo-babe blouses and maxiskirts. “Easy to dismiss” objects become immediately covetable accessories: Reflective bicycle clips turned into earrings, and shopping bags made in iridescent white leather that glimmer under the spotlights.Even the most normal of normal garments, jeans, is alchemized into style gold in her hands. This season she bleached and whisked denim in that unmissable early aughts style and dipped the waistline so daringly low around the models’ bums that were they not wearing tucked-in business casual button downs, their entire backsides would have been exposed. “Very, very naughty,” she smirks. “I definitely wanted an extreme sense of sexiness and cheekiness.”Countering the sexiness is the severity of her construction. Those exaggerated shoulders were made by canvassing and wadding the yokes and sleeves of garments to create a quirky shape she says is inspired by the ill fit of doll’s clothes. Elsewhere, the fringe you see hanging from sleeves and shirts is not appliquéd fringe at all, but the excess fabric from each garment’s construction, shredded into thin strips. “It’s fun to wear,” she says of her ingeniously constructed details. “And it’s fun to watch.”It’s no wonder the fashion world is clamoring for more from Rose. The day before the show, Skepta fired off a series of tweets implying that Rose should succeed Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton—a rumor that has run rampant in the fashion world since Abloh’s untimely death in 2021. Rose stays mum on the topic. While she absolutely deserves the job, after tonight’s tour de force runway, it’s obvious that she doesn’t need fashion’s grand stage to create a sense of drama—or beauty for that matter.