Martine Rose Is Your Favorite Designer’s Favorite Designer – GQ
Tue 27 Jun
Being a fashion designer is a tough gig. Seasonal collections are expensive to produce. Without coming from a place of real privilege or attaching yourself to a giant fashion house, it’s almost impossible to make it work. “It’s been really difficult,” Martine Rose, who has headed up her own label since 2007, says over Zoom from her airy North London studio. “I was so unsure for so long that I nearly gave up. Sometimes I still think about it. This isn’t easy. Oh, hell no.”
the power of clothes
When Rose was younger, her older relatives were deep-rooted in the '90s rave culture and she became accustomed to seeing them in Versace shirts and Moschino jeans. “My cousin Darren was into Boy London and he gave me a T-shirt, which was my most treasured possession. I still have it today. It’s super thin and has a big acid smiley face on the front. I knew it represented something. It had power over the government. I knew it meant something. I knew it represented this sort of mystery world. It was then I understood the power of clothes.”
But Rose, at first, didn’t realize she wanted a career in fashion. She did a foundation course at Camberwell College of Art and after a module focused on textiles she realized that working in the industry was something she could be down with. She enrolled in fashion design at Middlesex University and found herself drawn to menswear. After graduating in 2002 she set up a T-shirt line, LMNOP, with a friend, Tamara Rothstein. “We were really bored, basically, and we did 10 T-shirts. We had a friend running a showroom during London Fashion Week, and they impressed the buyers. It really did surprisingly well.” But LMNOP’s success didn’t last, largely because the pair wanted to explore new ventures, and the brand folded. Yet Rose had a taste for designing. She applied for a loan of £1,500 (about $2,000) from the Prince’s Trust, which she was granted, and in 2007 she set up her eponymous label.