How Martine Rose Became Menswear’s Secret Weapon

After much speculation, the fashion rumors were true: Martine Rose is officially Balenciaga’s next creative director. It’s undoubtedly her biggest job yet—and a historic appointment: she is the first woman creative director to lead the French house. Rose succeeds Valentino vet Pierpaolo Piccioli, whose departure after just three seasons was announced yesterday. This is a major moment for the British-Jamaican designer, who has spent nearly two decades building a namesake label that wields outsize influence.Rose has long occupied a curious position in menswear: a designer’s designer with a devoted following of both high-fashion heads and the streetwear obsessed. Since launching her eponymous brand in 2007, she’s developed an unmistakable visual language of playful styling, graphic-driven sportswear, offbeat tailoring, and covetable sneaker collabs. Her clothes take the familiar and make it strange, infusing everyday garments with humor, a touch of romance, and occasionally an ugly-chic sensibility: think square-toed loafers, chap-covered suit trousers, and soccer jerseys with lace-up fastenings. The results can be loud, wildly stylish, and routinely fun.“I’ve always been drawn to the way men are told to dress,” the designer told GQ in 2023. She’s been on a mission to subvert those conventions ever since.On the Martine Rose runway, sportswear and tailoring regularly share the spotlight. Much of that sensibility comes from her ability to borrow from and fuse London’s historic subcultures: ravers and club kids, football fanatics and nattily dressed mods. She tends to embrace the unusual and eccentric rather than focusing on making everything read as conventionally stylish. One look from a recent collection featured a swishy track jacket tucked into straight-leg blue jeans, and another paired a perfectly tailored coat with athletic shorts and knee-high socks. In Rose’s universe, there is no wrong way to mix and match. That’s part of her charm.That sensibility eventually caught the eye of Demna during his decade-long tenure as Balenciaga’s creative director. The firebrand Georgian designer reached out to Rose in 2015, and she spent the next three years as a menswear consultant for the house during a high-profile era defined by supersized proportions and outlandish accessories. The blazers were big and the boots were bigger, but the star power of the celebrities who wore them was the biggest of all.Rose is no stranger to dressing famous people. Her clothes have landed on some of the most photographed men in the world: Drake, Timothée Chalamet, Bad Bunny, A$AP Rocky. Perhaps her most visible endorsement came at the 2025 Super Bowl, when Kendrick Lamar strutted around the halftime show in a custom red, white, and blue leather varsity jacket designed by Rose. (In 2023, the rapper had boasted about how he wears “Martine when I board jets” on the Baby Keem track “The Hillbillies”; a year later, he sported several of her designs in his “Not Like Us” video.) Over the years, Rose has become one of the rare designers whose collections are covered by both Vogue and Hypebeast, a testament to her appeal across fashion’s various tribes. She’s been a fixture at London Fashion Week, and made her Milan debut in 2024. She has two hit Supreme collaborations under her belt. When Nike came calling, Rose produced remixed versions of the Shox (which Lamar wore while he accepted three Grammys in 2023) and Monarch sneakers—turning two of the Swoosh’s most divisive silhouettes into lustworthy objects. Tommy Hilfiger enlisted her for a collection centered on the streetwise style of Tommy Jeans in the ’90s. Brands know she can deliver the goods.Which brings us back to the Balenciaga appointment. Rose obviously knows the house, or at least Demna’s vision for it—a vision that brought meme-worthy fashion but also massive creative and commercial success. A statement from Luca de Meo, CEO of Kering (the French luxury group that owns Balenciaga), included all the boilerplate press language about innovation, creativity, and culture. More crucially, Rose has proven she can make familiar clothes feel fresh, taking what guys are already wearing and turning them into something surprising and covetable. The question is now what Rose will be able to do with the resources of a global luxury powerhouse at her disposal. She’s spent much of her career building her own idiosyncratic world at Martine Rose. At Balenciaga, she’ll find herself on a much bigger stage with a vast audience and a completely new rulebook.In 2020, when discussing her reputation as something of an underground darling, Rose told GQ: “I’ve never really wanted to be part of a big thing. Anything that is mainstream—since I was small—hasn’t really appealed to me.” Six years later, she’s earned one of the biggest jobs in fashion. There’s great fun in evolution, too.