If you’ve ever looked at a pair of Nike Shox and thought they might make a good evening shoe, congratulations: you and Martine Rose have something in common. The designer who turned those trainers into square-toed mules is Balenciaga’s new creative director. Kering announced her appointment this morning, a day after confirming Pierpaolo Piccioli’s departure. She starts in Paris on 16 November, though she’ll already know her way around: Rose consulted on menswear for Demna at the house from 2015 to 2018, when those outsized silhouettes were starting to change how everyone else cut a jacket.
Since starting her own label in 2007, the British-Jamaican designer has made a habit of looking for fashion in places the industry tends to overlook. She’s held a show among the stalls of Tottenham’s Seven Sisters Indoor Market and another in a Kentish Town cul-de-sac, with residents watching from their gardens. There’s a similar curiosity in the clothes: a football shirt or a boxy blazer can tell you quite a lot about the person wearing it, especially when the proportions are just a little off.
In the announcement, Kering CEO Luca de Meo singled out Rose’s “connection to the new generation and her instinctive understanding of culture”. There’s a commercial expectation behind that compliment: as The Business of Fashion reports, Kering is looking to revive sales at Balenciaga. Rose’s familiarity with the house makes the appointment feel less like a gamble, though the scale of the job is new. What she can do with a couture atelier is the part we haven’t seen. And if her shows in London are any indication, who she puts in the clothes might be just as interesting as what she makes.
Which brings us to Piccioli. The former Valentino designer took over in July 2025, after a decade in which Demna had made Balenciaga equally recognisable for its couture and its trainers. Piccioli used his October debut, The Heartbeat, to see what Cristóbal Balenciaga’s ideas about volume could do for an everyday wardrobe. By the time he showed his first couture collection this July, he was using neo-gazar, a reworking of a fabric developed by the founder, both on the outside of garments and inside them to hold their shape. You could see why he’d been hired in the first place: he knew how to make a dress stand away from the body without making it look stiff.
Balenciaga CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli said Piccioli had “reaffirmed the couture origins of the House” in yesterday’s statement, which gave no reason for his departure. After less than sixteen months, we’d only just begun to see what his Balenciaga might look like. A dress in neo-gazar and a trainer turned mule might sound like they belong at opposite ends of the wardrobe, but both designers know how much you can change a garment simply by moving its edges. Rose will bring a different set of people and places into view. Let’s hope she gets the time to see what happens when they walk through the door.
