“I saw a video about Bob Fosse, and what really struck me was how many older men he had dancing, and how that looked really sexy and cool. Balding men as the sort of romantic lead—I loved it. And I thought, isn’t that funny? We’re used to seeing all different types of people leading fashion on the catwalks, except we haven’t seen balder, old men. So I decided to put them at the center and front.”
That’s the thought that set Martine Rose on her typically affirmative-slash-subversive path to making a lookbook and video for her fall 2022 collection: the idea of getting a group of older guys together, to dance. “It was wonderful watching them, because there’s something that just happens when you dance. They sort of relaxed and stuff, this youthfulness came out. It was so fun,” she said. “Because I think the thing is, when you’re younger, and you view aging from a distance, you imagine that you’re going to grow up and you’re going to feel differently. And then you start growing up yourself and you realize that nothing really changes, you know. You still want to do those things you still love!”
These guys had the moves alright. Rose brought in three women photographers—Sharna Osbourne, Rosie Marks, and Camille Vivier—to get the party started on a set which involved a turntable, a treadmill, and a chopped-up car hulk. “We were thinking of a time when those sorts of men in the ’60s would be in adverts for cars, watches, and booze. But really, it was about collisions of lots of different things, like subcultures, club cultures, with very male codes underneath them.”
Look up Fosse’s totally delightful ’60s club-fashion pastiche “Rich Man’s Frug” to see why women wearing tinsel wigs also got in on Rose’s act. (Truth is that women like to buy her clothes almost as much as men.) Nothing’s straight-on in Martine Rose-world, though. The attraction’s always in her slyly sleazy twists on under-observed social signifiers. There’s a bit of flash—a shiny silver tailored suit; her satin shirts with buttons sliding on the diagonal, and, this time, a tucked-in neckline. “That,” she laughed, “was the idea of being in such a hurry to get into the club that you don’t even care how you’ve pulled on your clothes!”
Her prints hold coded stories too. Some are taken from rave flyers promoting ‘Carefree Dancing’ and ‘Alive With Pleasure.’ Paint-splashed tracksuit prints recall Gabber ravers of the ’90s. There’s a telephone-receiver print version—red, on a pair of white plastic jeans—inspired by 1980s Athena airbrush poster art by Syd Brak. “Which felt,” she chuckled, “kind of suggestive. Because we always have our tongue firmly in our cheek.”
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