Martine Rose wants you to dress like a wheeler-dealer for AW25

When it comes to debuting her collections, Martine Rose has always danced to the beat of her own drum. From recreating leather bars in Vauxhall, staging surprise shows in Paris and subverting conventional beauty in perfect Milan, Rose does what she wants, where she wants – and this season was no exception. While the vast majority of the industry are braving the cold, grey streets of Paris for the latest round of menswear shows, the London designer has quietly released a digital lookbook of her AW25 collection – but when you’re Martine Rose, how quiet can it really be?

Known for her allusions to London life and the everyday people who make up the city, this season the designer took us to the hustle and bustle of your local high street, for a collection inspired by “memories of different markets and stalls, and their characteristic traders”. Dealing in the many avatars of that specific scene, Rose nods to “archival workwear stalls and the nerds who inhabit them” by kitting models out in 80s-inspired block colour knits, sun-bleached carpenter trousers and multi-pocket utility tops. Elsewhere, the designer’s “eccentric lady heroic in market communities” is telegraphed through a leather wrap skirt with animal print detailing, fringed suede trousers, Pat Butcher earrings and a “waistcoat cut in the memory of a crazy granny”, while references to “streetwear car boot sales” emerge through logoed sportswear, jazzy shirting and Rose-branded football tops. When you think about it, the many faces of the London market is a very Martine source of inspo, and we’re surprised the designer hasn’t brought us to these bustling streets before.

Throughout the rest of the collection, market references are conveyed in wallet chains attached to jeans, huge ski coats to protect from the bracing British weather, bumbags and backpacks with logos splashed across them, plus a tote bag disguised as a crinkled brown Jiffy envelope, perfect for wheeler-dealers to stash their goods at the end of a hard day’s work. Most market stall of all, though, is one particular avatar in short shorts, knee-high leather boots and a thick green parka coat, the life and soul of a market community, who many will recognise if you come from a part of the country not dissimilar to Rose.

Forgoing a show for AW25, all of these characters were revealed in a digital lookbook dropped this afternoon, lensed by photographer Tim Gutt. Though the label hasn’t noted the official inspo for the shoot, there’s something unquestionably Lynchian about the whole affair, as the market stall characters pose in front of disembodied projections, hide in red curtains similar to Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge, and generally skulk about in a way that recalls the late David Lynch’s work. But rather than Lynchian just being a catchall phrase for ‘a bit weird’, here Gutt and Rose seem to be channelling the director’s ability to make the familiar and quotidian – in this case market traders – seem unfamiliar and strange, therefore recasting them as figures of reverence and intrigue, as we assume Rose must believe them to be. In the press statement accompanying the collection, the label outlined how the clothes attempt to “find seduction in the unreliable, the unresolved and the unestablished” and are rooted in “a profound need to be avant-garde, reflected in overt gestures of creativity” – and, really, what’s more Lynchian than that?