NIKE X MARTINE ROSE

By self-admission,;Martine Rose;has never been interested in fashion but fascinated by how people “interact with clothes.”; This mantra is at the base of the;London-based menswear designer’s first collaboration with Nike, a capsule featuring tracksuits, football jerseys and a completely remastered;Nike Air Monarch.;In typical Rose style, the line-up features plenty of;distorted proportions, flanked by her ability to transform the ordinary into something “really quite exceptional.” Most often, the transformation happens through a rule-breaking experimentation with form and fit.; The clothing has English subcultural reference points, but the scale is based on basketball players.;“Basketball players are superhuman — their bodies have formed in different ways because of their profession. We looked at a lot of players and their proportions. We then re-imagined their clothes on average-size people. For example, if I were wearing one of their tracksuits, I would have to repurpose it in order to fit my proportions; I’d have to tuck the seams,” explains Rose. As for the Monarch,;“it was very intentional to use the Monarch as the silhouette, being a very American shoe, and then put it with the very English silhouette of the tracksuit,” says Rose. To give a very ordinary shoe a very extraordinary shape, Rose relied on Nike’s undisputed expertise.;Groundbreaking to the max, starting with fitting a size 18 upper to size 9 tooling, Rose’s Air Monarch was built as a series of molds that were;topped with stretched synthetic leather.