“I have never been interested in fashion. I've always been interested in how people interact with clothes” says London-based menswear designer Martine Rose.
Her first collaboration with Nike plays, as much of Rose’s work does, on distorted proportion. The creation process concentrates on finding things that appear ordinary but have something extraordinary about them and transforming those into items that are, in Rose’s words, “really quite exceptional”. And as we can see the transformation generally deals with form fit. That’s why the Air Monarch, celebrating an American standard, is the perfect candidate.
To give that very ordinary shoe a very extraordinary shape, Rose relied on Nike’s undisputed expertise in footwear beginning with fitting a size 18 upper to size 9 tooling. “We wanted some of the forms to spill over the base and we wanted the heel on the outfit to be further out than the sole. Bringing this vision to commercial life required inventive development, things we were initially told couldn't be done” she says, “But everyone kept on pushing and we ended up developing these new shapes and ideas”.
The innovative-yet-classic stunning Martine Rose X Nike Air Monarch IV will be available online starting saturai, January 12.
