At her Spring/Summer 2023 runway show in London, Martine Rose debuted a new Nike Shox collaboration that makes her Air Monarch sneaker look like a stroll in the park. Thought regular Shox were advanced? Try these on for size.
Rose has stretched out the Shox to exaggerated proportions, a similar approach to her fan-fave, over-the-top loafers that squared-off the toe of a typical lounge shoe and occasionally sliced off the toe.
The new Martine Rose x Nike Shox, likewise, disassemble convention wholesale, affecting the same kind of tossed-on ease as the rest of her SS23 collection.
Rose lopped off the heel of her Shox to create a kind of high-tech mule, sharpening the toebox to an elongated nub and flattening the sole to affect a similar shape to the clunky Sunday's Best derbies that've appeared in prior Rose collections.
Thus, an already next-level shoe becomes a truly transcendental object worthy of praise, ridicule, obsession, scorn — anything except boredom.
This innate ability to provoke, this unironic appreciation of kitsch, aligns Rose with many of her other Nü-British peers, though Rose's pub glass filter toys with an especially macho type of unfashionable fashion.
Her square-toed shoes, acid-washed jeans, form-obscuring blazers, and contrastingly tight T-shirts are more commercial than they seem, and no one's doing it quite like Rose.
Maybe that's why Louis Vuitton chairman Michael Burke took the trip to London to see Rose's SS23 presentation in-person, leading more than a few tongues to start wagging about Martine Rose potentially succeeding Virgil Abloh at the luxury maison.
Other candidates are also on the table, apparently, including the inimitable Grace Wales Bonner and Samuel Ross, but Rose's canny uninterpretation of contemporary menswear does align her with the many Abloh-isms that define the LV of today.
