Welcome back to i-Dentity, where we celebrate global subcultures, past and present. This week, we caught up with London-based fashion designer Martine Rose, a rare example of someone who has both commercial success and critical acclaim — a designers’ designer as it were — and is known around the world to both fashion fanatics and subculture boffs. 

Born in 1980 in Croydon, Martine is a Londoner through and through, having grown up in her grandparent’s house in South London, which was the centre of the local Jamaican community. From the age of nine, she spent Sundays after church on Clapham Common observing daytime ravers set up sound systems — and was introduced to reggae studios and nightclubs at an early age by her older sister, Michelle. “It was the biggest mix of people I think I'd ever seen,” she says. “I knew instinctively, even at that young age, that something important was happening.”

Her upbringing set her on the path to a lifelong exploration of British nightlife, music and subculture, eventually becoming a part of her work as a fashion designer, graduating from Middlesex University in 2002 and setting up her namesake label in 2007. “If I wasn't a fashion designer, what would I be?” she ponders in this episode. “I'd be a barmaid … It’s always been dance music for me.”

Martine’s work riffs on contemporary everyday clothes, often containing nods to her encyclopaedic knowledge of British subcultures – from acid house heads to 90s junglists, football hooligans and gabber ravers to the rude boys of the reggae scene. In the way they’re cut and formed, Martine’s clothes read as garments already worn in; familiar but twisted, sometimes too-big or too-small, always with something a bit ‘off’.

Her casting has always been radically inclusive, and was so long before it was fashionable. And often, her fashion shows are held in off-the-beaten-path locations: a primary school in Kentish Town, a climbing centre in Tottenham, a former gay sauna in Vauxhall, a Latin food market in Seven Sisters — almost always a love letter to London. “It reinforced my love of outsiders and characters and complicated geniuses,” she says of her early years in London, sneaking into clubs and working at bars in Soho.

However, survival hasn’t always been easy as a creative person. By 2015, Martine faced homelessness after being kicked out of the squat she was living in with her partner and baby. That same year, Martine got a job that would prove to be life-changing: Balenciaga’s Demna asked her to be a menswear consultant for the brand. For the next three years, she helped perfect the enlarged silhouette at Balenciaga, changing the shape of fashion, from the catwalk to the high street. “[Demna] was just like, ‘Well, I believe in you. Who gives a shit about anyone else?’” she reflects.

Now, through her collaborations with Nike and Clarks, Martine has reached a global audience – and picked up plenty of awards and accolades along the way  – all while remaining respected within her local community of outsiders. She is a designer who does things her own way, often refusing to comply with the system. “No one is an island — you don't do it on your own,” she points out. “Find those people… and do it together, because you're stronger together, and you will do it together.”