Martine Rose celebrates London’s overlooked community hubs for SS24 – I-D
Mon 12 Jun
Words Mahoro Seward
Set in a North London working men’s club, the brand’s latest collection was a characteristically playful toast to the city’s eclectic style.
“Before club culture was what it is now, people co-opted community spaces and ballrooms and put on nights there.”
Martine Rose
The exploration of London’s local communities, and the locations key to their continued existence, has always been a pillar of Martine Rose’s namesake brand. It’s an ethos that has always made itself felt in the clothes – lovingly crafted homages to characters spotted at Clapham Common’s open-air afterhours, City diners, Afro-Caribbean produce markets and gay cruising clubs – but its arguably in Martine’s shows, invariably staged in the very locales from which she draws inspiration, that it truly comes to life.
This season was no exception, with London’s fash pack traipsing up Highgate Hill to a local community centre, not too far, in fact, from Martine’s current studio in neighbouring Crouch Hill. Stepping in from the sticky summer heat, you were immediately transported to the 70s and early 80s, when working men’s clubs like these thrummed with life, serving not only as daytime hubs for the communities around them, but as impromptu nighttime wellsprings for the city’s youth culture, as Martine explained post-show: “Before club culture was what it is now, people co-opted community spaces and ballrooms and put on nights there,” memories that were faithfully conjured by on seeing a crowd that included Daniel Lee, Neneh Cherry and Mustafa The Poet necking chilled pints of Stella in the space’s red-lit, sweaty haze.