Martine Rose’s Louche Pitti Uomo Present Pays Homage to Italian Tradition

Italy is having a second proper now. A plethora of current TV set throughout the area – season two of Mike White’s The White Lotus, a Netflix adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Mendacity Lifetime of Adults, and even Stanley Tucci’s grand meals tour Looking for Italy – all feed into the nation’s infamously carnal, hedonistic picture (for this, we will additionally thank Name Me by Your Identify). From a foreigner’s perspective, it may really feel as if Italians dwell purely for the pursuit of enjoyment and aesthetic magnificence. And as her present as visitor designer at Pitti Uomo yesterday night in Florence proved, London-based designer Martine Rose is minimize from a equally carefree fabric.

Properly identified for embracing and assimilating the south London rave and reggae subcultures she grew up round within the 90s, music has at all times been on the coronary heart of Rose’s model. At her Autumn/Winter 2023 present final night time – the designer’s first exterior of London – British hardcore segued into Italian home music, with fashions storming by the Mercato Nuovo, a Florentine open-air market relationship again to the mid-1500s that had been kitted out like a “louche” nightclub, with lush chartreuse carpeting and panelled mirrors. “I needed to deliver my London previous,” Rose mentioned backstage of the present’s soundtrack. “There’s a lot about music that brings us collectively … it unifies the whole lot.”

On the runway, Rose’s outsized tailoring was again, impressed by Nineteen Eighties New Wave – she is broadly credited because the brains behind Demna’s outsized silhouettes at Balenciaga, the place she started consulting on menswear again in 2015 – together with one relatively hilarious ‘BuyOneGetOneFree’ blue jumpsuit, which gave the thrifty phantasm of a two-piece go well with from the entrance. Rose’s earlier Spring/Summer time 2023 present, which unfolded in a latex-lined tunnel in Vauxhall, was heavy on sleaze and sexuality; A/W23 as an alternative had a extra well mannered air of sleaze, with many fashions carrying luggage mimicking the kind of paper-and-string reward luggage you get from department shops – pristinely tied up with black bows – regardless of the clubby setting. This sense of ritual was additional enhanced by Rose’s square-toe boots and loafers, and a brand new colourway of her extremely coveted dress-shoe-trainer hybrid – the final word mixture of formal and informal. Swimsuit jackets and shirts got a western spin with cowboy fringing; yet one more fusion of silliness and smartness.  

As for the fashions, Rose embraced the placement, casting a mixture of “native heroes” together with Italian footballers and bar and restaurant homeowners alongside her regular motley crew of street-cast British “outsiders”. “I’m within the on a regular basis and I actually do see the sweetness in on a regular basis issues and on a regular basis folks,” Rose continued backstage. “I discover magnificence in issues which are straightforward to not discover magnificence in … issues which are straightforward to dismiss.”

A triumphant hybrid of Italian and British sensibilities, there was one particularly cheeky present element that introduced the Martine Rose model of humour house: again within the Renaissance, the Mercato Nuovo hosted the pietra dello scandalo – a spot the place those that couldn’t afford to pay their money owed obtained public bum spankings. Right this moment, the placement is house to cheesy memento stalls for vacationers, however – identical to the Martine Rose model – dig a bit of deeper and there may be each humour, lighthearted perversion, and a wealth of historical past to be discovered.