This morning’s news made the fashion industry truly feel like the community it professes to be: Martine Rose has officially been announced as the creative director of Balenciaga, a house to which she has ties dating back to 2015. Back then, as a consultant for Demna, she refined a menswear aesthetic that set a new agenda for the genre. Since that period (and, actually, for many years before), she has consistently created clothes that challenge fashion to think beyond its sometimes narrow perspectives on what defines looking and feeling good. It’s with due cause, then, that my group chats and DMs are currently a hive of Christmas Eve excitement.
Although it might feel like it, the last time there was such a unanimously rapturous response to a designer appointment wasn’t actually that long ago – just over a year ago, when Grace Wales Bonner was announced as the artistic director of Hermès menswear.
The collective joy that both appointments have been met with speaks measures of what this industry – and culture – at large craves. There is, of course, their representational value. I’m not saying that this is quite on the scale of Lula’s victory in Brazil or the recent blue wave in the US, but in an industry where “pale, male and stale” has long been de facto at the highest creative ranks, it’s both relieving and refreshing to see two of fashion’s most esteemed institutions appoint Black (British, no less!) women to their top seats. Without burdening them with the responsibility of being role models, per se, they are both already significant figures of aspiration for many, and the scope of their influence and capacity to inspire will now only amplify.
This is of course important, but what I think makes this moment even more so – and what their appointments bring to fashion’s table – has little (if anything) to do with similarities on the level of identity. Rather, it has more to do with difference – particularly their commitment to celebrating difference as a virtue in itself.
There are certainly similarities to draw between their respective practices – their subcultural intrigues, their contemplation of what it means to express gender through clothing (and how faithfully it can), their simultaneously reverent and subversive relationships with tailoring and sportswear. The key similarity for me, though, is their commitment to perceiving and celebrating culture as a distinctly plural entity. Both designers are living proof that fashion is at its best when it looks beyond its own parameters.
Just look at their references. For Grace, her work has always been underpinned by borderline academic social, cultural and historical research, excavating crucial, typically overlooked chapters of history pertaining to the global majority. She engages with these histories – whether the coronation of Haile Selassie, the thriving jazz scene of post-independence Burkina Faso, or the architecture of Balkrishna Doshi – with a rigour and respect seldom seen within typical fashion contexts. Her approach resembles an institutional curator – a function she’s fulfilled, curating shows at both London’s Serpentine Gallery and New York’s MoMA. And yet, despite the weight of the research that her clothes carry, they wear it so lightly.
Martine Rose autumn/winter 2026. Courtesy Martine Rose
Wales Bonner autumn/winter 2026.
Photo: Malick Bodian / Courtesy of Wales BonnerIn Martine’s case, there’s an anthropological spirit to the work she creates – and the worlds she builds around it – but never does it feel like the product of a field study. She invariably speaks from within the contexts she cites – or at least from the point of a deeply human understanding of them – looking to highlight and venerate a beauty – often a sexiness – that she sees in a person, a garment, or how a particular person wears a particular garment that capital-F fashion typically overlooks. While her work has often been discussed in terms of its celebration of “ordinariness”, I would argue that it does the opposite – it teases out the nuances, peculiarities and distinctions that are so often homogenised into a blur of “norminess”. In an industry in which the pursuit of the spectacular is , Martine shows us that it exists right in front of us, walking down your very street right now – and always with a loving, humanising lens.
At their shows, both transport audiences to worlds that many in the room would never have thought to enter. I remember a Wales Bonner show at Serpentine Gallery, aligned with the exhibition she’d curated there, where models filed along shrines created by artists such as Laraaji, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Eric N. Mack. And I remember a Martine Rose show in a hazed-out arch beneath Vauxhall station that once housed a relatively recently defunct gay sauna.
Martine Rose spring/summer 2026.
Martine Rose spring/summer 2026.
Rather than provocative or concertedly edgy, it was a deeply human gesture – a recognition of the real lives of people around her, and a celebration of the ways they choose to live them. It’s a perspective reflected in the clothes she creates, designed for life at its most mundane and most fabulously freakish. She takes the so-often unglorified facets of what it is to be human and gives them a truly glorious platform.
In a recent video posted on his Instagram, fellow London-based designer Charles Jeffrey brilliantly underscored why Rose is so deserving of her Balenciaga job, noting that “she speaks to a community that doesn’t see themselves in the [luxury] space.” I entirely agree, but I’d take it a step further and say that her suitability lies in her ability to both speak to communities that haven’t typically been represented in fashion’s upper tiers, and make that language clearly understood to those that have. Rather than strictly “for us, by us”, Martine embodies a “from us, for everyone” mentality – with the original “us” never cast aside.
That’s why these appointments matter so much. In their respective roles, both Grace and Martine will have the power to shape fashion’s parameters of aspiration and desirability – which, as we all know well, trickle down into culture at large. While it wouldn’t be fair to offer projections as to how they should wear that responsibility, it would also be moot. After all, both have proven how expansive, dynamic and agenda-setting their perspectives are through their independent practices. In their new roles, the potential and impact of their resonance is pretty much limitless. I guess what I really want to say is how happy I am for them both – and for all of us.