“There’s something really sexy about an open fly,” Martine joked. Sex was implied in stages of dress and undress, in flies pulling open, ill-fitting jackets, skirts rolled up and dresses unzipped at the back, all implying clothing just pulled on after a joyful and illicit dalliance. The season’s new silhouette was a coat pulled in tight to the body, cropped and tucked in and close. This movement was mirrored in the clothes, which were all about the interplay between toughness and attitude and the fervent pull of sexual attraction. The show started with the sounds of masculine panting and groaning emanating from deep in the depths of the night before moving into the slinky hardness of an industrial EBM soundtrack. I didn’t want anything removed or distant.” I wanted to create an experience for the people there, and pull people into it. “I wanted people to see the sweat on the bodies, feel the closeness to the clothes, feel the energy as the models walk past.
“I wanted people to smell the latex,” Martine said. It was about recreating that closeness and intimacy to fashion we’ve missed during the pandemic. There was minimal space between the viewer and the models on the catwalk. The tunnel-like room was misty and dark, and flanked with even darker latex curtains that were pulled up close to the seating. It needs to be enjoyed.” Not many designers do pleasure as interestingly as Martine. “It’s a really important, old community in London,” Martine explained. Incidentally it is just down the road from where Martine herself grew up. In its heyday, it was the libidinal hub of an area that has been home to the sexiest and seediest hedonists since the Pleasure Gardens inhabited the area in the seventeenth century. The show was staged in the arches beneath Vauxhall station that once housed Chariots – one of London’s most storied gay saunas. She creates clothes that feel unique in the way that clothes feel unique after we’ve worn them for years.īut desire may as well have been the one-word distillation of the theme this season. She is interested in the way clothes mould us, and the way we mould the clothes we wear to our needs and desires. Which is not to say what she does is rooted in philosophies of normcore and the prosaic realities of easy wearability, but instead in the holistic magic that springs from the cross-pollination of the metropolis.