Oh, to have been in the studio when Martine Rose and her team were designing this fur- and fun-filled collection brimming with offbeat and wonderful texture and color.
What a laugh the team must have had, adding jazzy animal-print inserts or Muppet-y hot pink fur to dark denim and flocked trousers, corset stitching to jackets and bits of slinky lingerie to dress shirts. The look book models clearly had fun, too, striking overly confident, kooky poses for the camera.
“It’s decadent through our lens, a mix of ’90s club wear and old world opulence,” Rose said. “It’s about dressing up and showing off.” Rose looked to a variety of sartorial show-offs for inspiration, including King Henry VIII, James Brown and the British boxer known as Prince Naseem.
She nodded to Naseem’s triumphant, peacocking walks around the ring by creating built-in hoods and scarves that resembled towels. She added them to the necks of satin bomber and squarish leather jackets, and even made a miniskirt from the stiff, terry cloth-like fabric.
Renaissance glamour came through with flourishes of chunky, “old lady fur” or pink fluff on the collars, shoulders and sleeves of tracksuit tops with racing stripes, or sporty parkas. It also surfaced in trousers with curvy corset details around the hips, and leather styles with lacing up the front.
Shirts were a mix of the serious and saucy, with long-sleeve pinstripes and serious collared styles spliced with black, lacy lingerie at the front. Cotton T-shirts had a more formal air with dramatic rounded Renaissance-style sleeves.
Rose said her mission this season was to “go back to the clothes,” focus on the silhouette, conjure drama, romance and humor and she certainly accomplished it. This was a fall collection, a history lesson and a happy pill rolled into one, and was hard not to love.
