How Martine Rose Built Fashion’s Last Subcultural Brand
British-Jamaican designer Martine Rose has made a whole career out of morphing the weird into something cool, but even she had to be surprised by how directly her recent work has captured the zeitgeist. The uniforms and imagery of football (that’s soccer to you Americans) have always been a part of her collections, which plunder the oddities of the past three decades of British culture, but this season she yanked it front and center. She was thinking about a time during her childhood when the arrival of ’90s club culture led to a decline in crime among football fanatics. It used to be that if you saw a guy in a football jersey, you crossed the road, she told me this past weekend on the phone, sitting in her backyard in London. “And I remember in 1989, the summer of love, when rave music came to the UK, almost overnight football hooliganism stopped. And the reason was that instead of fighting on the terraces, they were now dancing with each other, joining in on club culture. It didn’t matter what club you played for—everyone was at the club on Friday night, doing drugs and loving each other.” She remembers, at age nine, seeing all these guys congregating on a green in South London, “still clearly on drugs, though I didn’t know it at the time,” dancing into the night, their jerseys tucked into their back pockets. Read more at GQ.
