Martine Rose SS26 Built a Salon Inside a Job Centre in Lisson Grove

Tamara Rothstein styled it. Pascal Gambarte was in the special thanks. The show happened in a disused job centre in Lisson Grove, London, which had been cleared out and transformed into a salon space connected to a market featuring independent local traders. Martine Rose presented Spring/Summer 2026 off-schedule, in the neighborhood she has worked from for over a decade, with the kind of production that costs a fraction of a tent in Hyde Park and carries twice the cultural weight. The collection explored what Rose described as "complicated characters, seductions, and provocations." The framing was a deliberate set of tensions: "public nakedness" against structured garments, community spirit against self-interest, vintage erotica against tailoring. If that sounds contradictory, it is supposed to. ## Shrunken Tailoring and a Nike Collaboration That Keeps Going The collection includes shrunken tailoring, leather jackets in deliberately awkward proportions, lace-trimmed satin boxers worn visibly against structured outerwear, and T-shirts spliced with sailing jackets. The fabric mix ranges from cotton jersey to technical synthetics to leather, with proportions throughout that sit just far enough from standard to register without being theatrical. Martine Rose has partnered with Nike consistently for years. The SS26 collection debuted new colorways of the Nike Shox MR4 mule, which Rose has been developing into her own signature silhouette within the collaboration. The Shox MR4 is a mid-2000s running shoe with a column-spring midsole technology that Nike originally marketed for performance cushioning. As a mule, with the heel removed and the proportions adjusted, it becomes something else: a silhouette that holds both the technical reference and the fashion modification simultaneously. ## Lisson Grove and the Specific Geography of Martine Rose's Work Martine Rose grew up in South London. Her label has operated in North London for most of its life. Lisson Grove, where the SS26 show happened, is a mixed-income neighborhood in the City of Westminster, with a history that includes social housing estates built in the 1960s and 70s alongside Victorian terracing. The job centre that Rose took over for the show is a space with a specific civic history: it was used for employment services and welfare administration. The decision to dress models in seductive, body-conscious garments in a room where people formerly waited to access benefits is either a provocation or a community act. Rose apparently intended it as both. That local specificity is consistent with everything Martine Rose has done since her first collection. She is not making clothes for an imagined global customer. She is making clothes that emerge from a specific set of streets, social conditions, and subcultural histories in London. The job centre is not an ironic venue choice. It is a geographical statement. ## What SS26 Says About London Fashion in 2026 Martine Rose's SS26 is evidence that the most interesting work in London fashion is happening off-schedule, in neighborhoods that do not appear on the luxury retail map, with budgets that do not require a sponsor. The Lisson Grove show cost less to produce than a single look in a Paris couture show. It said more. The collection is selling through wholesale partners and the brand's own channels. The Nike collaboration pieces are expected to be the highest-demand items from the show. The shrunken tailoring and the leather jackets in awkward proportions are the work that will matter in five years when someone is trying to understand what London fashion did in 2026.