The Amazing Cultural Commentary Of Martine Rose

In today's video I talk about Martine Rose's Spring Summer 2025 / SS25 collection held at Milan Fashion Week.

“I want it to feel a little bit messy. Maybe I want to go against the expectations of a show in Milan a bit. I want to make it so that people don’t immediately walk into the show and get it.” So said Martine Rose last week of her plans for this show shortly before decamping from Crouch End to prepare it. Go time was this afternoon, straight after Prada—and everything Rose wanted, Rose got.

That messiness was communicated through the roughly guillotined Rose-imagery flyers that were strewn in front of the bleacher seating and the lo-fi scaffolding stanchions wrapped in material that punctuated the runway and contained Rose crew members who lit the models’ here-and-there route with torches. Not immediately getting the show was central to Rose’s project, not because she’s a hardscrabble Londoner coming into the land of caramel nappa pants but because the territory she wanted to explore and turn us on to was about the fringes of beauty.

Hence the noses: “The first thing you see in people is often their nose. And it is often the first thing they change about themselves.” Rose’s latex prosthetics, just like the hermit long wigs, were meant to obscure any immediate association in the audience with character and instead let their antennae react to the clothes. There was still the sense of family and community, here transmitted in the pieces printed with photo-booth shots of friends, family, and colleagues as well as the Rose-signature parody soccer shirts that this season saluted the mighty Inter Milan. However, the rough devices used to partially anonymize the models worked, after the initial WTF, to push your eye toward the garments.

These notably included finely tailored pencil skirts over net socks worn by evidently male models (around 25% of the show was womenswear) and Rose’s lushly lurid chisel-toe footwear. Said Rose: “It’s shocking because it’s unfamiliar, but it’s not actually shocking. The skirt is Bermuda-short length. A lot of men in India wear lungis. There’s nothing radical about a kilt. But this manages to be radical in a way that doesn’t really make sense.” Chap-silhouette suiting trousers were similar in the way they slyly stirred kink but were also perfectly proper.

As a Londoner, it stirred my soul to hear “Lamborghini” by Shut Up and Dance featuring Ragga Twins practically in the shadow of Fondazione Prada’s golden haunted house. Pushing that partiality aside, this new context also tested the reach of Rose’s sensually subversive distortions of archetype. Happily nothing here—from her moto-boob dresses and shirts to her bait-buckle bondage belts (that also double up as handcuffs)— seemed lost in translation. Forza Martine Rose!

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