Start-to-finish, the menswear shows at London Fashion Week last less than twelve hours – but in that action packed half-day what strikes through again and again is the sense of multiplicity – of design as a fluid, shape-shifting, unpredictable entity, pulsing in response to the city’s ever-changing tribal shifts and generational ruptures. So in the course of an hour (and the distance of a few hundred elegantly-cobblestoned yards) you can flip from Aquascutum’s eloquently streamlined simplicity to Jaiden RVA James’ full-frontal pyrotechnics, or from Omar Kashoura’s dishevelled, soft-focus tailoring to Katie Eary’s aggressively futuristic shock-factor – and every shade in between. It’s a boisterous, rivetingly jagged, downright confusing unevenness that you just don’t find in the other fashion capitals, with their smooth, dense homogeneity. Paris is soft, cerebral, fluid, haunted by the ghosts of its’ past: Milan, sharp, rich, sexual, exuberant: and New York, clean, sporty, upbeat and definite.
By comparison, London has always been “all of the above” – a packed-to-the-rafters whirlpool of often-conflicting ideas about masculinity and menswear. What is appropriate, what is beautiful, what is modern, what is “right” (and just as often, what is joyously “wrong”). And yet there are still prevailing winds – the tide of increasingly austere, minimalist abstraction driven by J.W. Anderson: the subversive, masterful games of New Power Studio: the knife-edge of youthful sensuality trodden by Felipe Rojas Llanos: and the dazzling, rude maximalism of Sibling and Agi & Sam.
Martine Rose sits somewhere in the midst of all these tides, treading a path notable for its’ understated independence: “the girl who makes shirts”.
Those shirts – monastically clean layers of cotton pierced with patchwork bursts of quilted silk – won Rose an early cult following, with their bold clarity and expertly handled balance of London’s split sartorial personality (Savile Row formality versus Kingsland Road swagger). And it’s that counterpoint and sense of unexpected collisions which have informed her work ever sense: a language driven forward by a vision which evolves, not just by internal refinement, but by continually provoking confrontation.
So it’s not surprising that the ragged-edged, powerfully tribal world of skateboarders should have fallen under her gaze. It’s a world complete with its’ own distinctive aesthetic: the eclectic, youthful verve of mismatched pieces: the defiantly counter-culture stance: the loose, easy layering driven by freedom and movement. In fact, it’s almost become mainstream, with the gradual relaxation of dress-codes, and 21st century fashion’s obsessive fascination with hybrids and half-breeds. But in Rose’s hands that intimidatingly urban machismo is pushed into close proximity with something altogether more dangerously subversive – the ethereal, dreamily nonchalant trans-dressing of Kurt Cobain and the Seattle grunge generation.
Twenty years after Cobain, a boy in a dress (outside the serene safe haven of Somerset House during Fashion Week) is still something radical, dangerous and discomfiting. Rose’s interjections – sheer white shirts and shorts floating over dizzying, piled-up prints and vivid jolts of colour, swathes of exotic pattern anchored with the sturdy heft of Caterpillar boots – revel in the dangerous ambiguity of it all. And they pick up on much of the unfinished taboo-breaking business of previous decades. Think of Sinead O’ Connor – an angry but beautiful shaven-headed angel in a tutu and Doc Martens (and “dragging up” as Veronica Lake, in blonde wig and ballgown, for John Maybury’s “You Do Something To Me”). Or Billy Eliot, the Northern boy concealing a shameful passion for the fragile, “effeminate” escapism of ballet . Or Charlotte Gainsbourg in “The Cement Garden”, teasing her teenage brother into a dress and murmuring “You’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you? How it feels for a girl”.
Martine Rose’s collections, in the best possible way, follow this tradition of both subtle and not-so-subtle challenge. Because for all our freedom and independence, men are still strangely reliant on the dresscodes and certainties of past generations to define their masculinity. And the flipside of London’s searingly eclectic menswear vanguard is a rising tide – one that pushes us closer and closer to the edge of something dangerous and new.
