A ROSE FOR BALENCIAGA
For she dresses men, those creatures so convinced of their own restraint that they have never noticed how much their sobriety is itself a disguise. Here and there, she slips a few feminine pieces into their wardrobes, like leaving a window slightly ajar in a room where the same voice has been speaking for far too long. Her style is urban, relaxed, and beneath this apparent nonchalance lies a gentle irony: she takes the codes of the masculine wardrobe, those old uniforms we believed eternal simply because no one had dared question them, and she questions them. Politely. With that particular insolence of the well-bred, who know better than anyone exactly where the cracks lie.
In London, she draws upon the Jamaica of her heritage and the Britain of her childhood, two countries that have never quite understood one another, yet which she has managed to reconcile through the art of dressmaking. Something diplomats have never achieved: apparently, all it took was a hem. There is, in this dual belonging, a way of inhabiting several places at once, of having several mothers and several homelands, and being not the poorer for it, but simply more numerous.
Her settings, meanwhile, evoke the neighbourhood, the street party, the neighbours who insist on knowing everyone’s business. A community: that is what she stages, with a nostalgia that never descends into sentimentality, but rather carries that slightly defiant tenderness we reserve for things that have disappeared, or perhaps never existed at all. And within this world, she reinvents gender roles with the gentleness of those who are not making politics, merely telling the truth. Men suddenly find themselves less guarded, and women less closely watched. A revolution without barricades, accomplished with shoulder pads.
She has worked with Clarks, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike; she has crossed paths with Demna at Balenciaga. Some might see these associations as compromises. I prefer to see them as proof that one can move among the great fashion houses without handing over the keys to one’s own. Martine Rose, meanwhile, has discovered a third way: to be ahead of her time, discreetly, like arriving at a party just after everyone has given up believing it would be any good.
All that remains is to wish her the strength to continue. For there is no nobler ambition for a woman who dresses men than to allow them to believe they have always possessed good taste, when in fact they have owed it to her from the very beginning.
FM