Martine Rose x Nike Pays Homage to the Women of Soccer – VOGUE
Tue 5 Jul
Today, British designer Martine Rose is announcing her second Nike collaboration, which eagle-eyed viewers may have first noticed during the superb collection she showed in London last month. The Nike Shox MR4 is her reimagined take on the classic Shox style which, in keeping with the spirit of the designer, became a mainstay of the British grime scene among other subcultures at the time of its release. Rose’s version has a higher “shox” to resemble a heel and is styled as a mule—a nod to the square-toed mules from Rose’s own label that have become something like her signature. The sneaker, available in white and red/black colorways (plus a third “highly limited” silver one for Rose’s friends and family), will go on sale on July 7 on Rose’s website, ahead of the upcoming UEFA Women’s Champions League soccer competition. More importantly for Martine Rose fanatics, it is the first release from a special capsule that will be unveiled over the next year.
“I knew that I wanted to use the shox profile, which in the U.K. has a particular sort of resonance in that it’s always been an underground shoe that everyone has worn,” Rose tells me over Zoom while sipping a cup of tea. “We were working on a few ideas and the one that stuck the most was, ‘How can we make a trainer a smart shoe?’” The high heel shox in particular proved to be a challenge. “We really wanted to make the shox like a high heel basically, and the factories had never done that before, so we really pushed them to go beyond what they felt their capabilities were, because we got a lot of pushback at first,” she recalls. “Nike supported us and encouraged the factory to go there and, finally, we landed on this style that works really well. It’s really a beautiful shape.”