Martine Rose doesn’t design for the moment you enter the room. She designs for the hour after, when the shirt’s half undone, the heels are off, and something personal lingers in the fabric. The walk home. The soft undoing. The look you didn’t plan but will remember anyway.
Martine Rose debuted her SS26 collection with a runway show inside a disused office block near Euston. With flickering lights, plastic blinds and stained carpet tiles, the setting set the tone: part job centre, part afters, part daydream. It felt familiar because it was. The kind of space you’ve passed through, waited in, forgotten about. Rose uses it as more than just atmosphere.
She calls this collection “straight to the point,” and it is, but only in the way a perfectly timed sentence can be. The tailoring is crisp but uneasy: exaggerated lapels, shrunken waists, sleeves slipping past the wrist. One pinstripe suit is so nipped it looks as though it might split open. Another hangs from the shoulders like a borrowed blazer worn home from someone else’s party. In one look, a boxy jacket is paired with lace-trimmed boxers and football socks pulled up under polished loafers; a collision of references that lands somewhere between gym class, club night and Sunday hangover.
Nylon bombers and synthetic ponchos sit over slouchy jeans or 80s-inspired knitwear. Satin shorts are worn with slingbacks. Football shirts are tucked into ruched skirts. A hot pink polo top, blaring “Total Participation” across the chest, is matched with washed-out denim streaked in retro graphics. There’s a visual static to it all: familiar pieces, scrambled slightly.
It’s not retro. It’s recognisable. Rose builds from archetypes – office wear, clubwear, British sportswear – and knocks them just slightly out of sync. A rugby shirt and pencil skirt aren’t worn with irony, but with intimacy. Accessories feel found rather than styled: rhinestone sunglasses, frizzy wigs, plastic handbags that read like corner shop chic. The looks are layered with memory but free from nostalgia.
Gender, as always, is ambient. Present but unannounced. Men wear kitten heels. Women wear power suits. Bodies move through clothing, not into boxes. Rose’s casting is always considered, but this season felt especially lived-in. Real posture. Real presence. No runway strut; more of a shuffle, a slouch, a glide.
This collection draws from Rose’s childhood memories of Kensington Market, a place where tailoring, sportswear and subcultural oddities were all sold under one roof. The SS26 show recreates that layered texture of London: messy, brilliant, contradictory. Like the garments themselves, it resists easy classification.
What felt most radical, though, was how little the collection seemed to care about being radical. Rose has never chased the spectacle, and this season, she walks even further away from it. No gimmicks. No slogans. Just clothing with memory, with residue. A feeling of having been worn, and worn again. Something private, revealed.
By the time the final look passed, with shirt collars splayed, heels clipped, one blazer dragging just slightly on the back of a calf, it was clear. This wasn’t about reinvention. It was about reinforcement. Of an aesthetic. Of a mood. Of a designer who has spent years refining what real subversion actually looks like.