What to know
- Nike and Martine Rose redefine sport for a new generation of athletes.
- The Nike x Martine Rose SHOX Mule MR4 dissolves the boundary between “getting off the plane and getting on the pitch.”
- The Nike x Martine Rose SHOX Mule MR4 launches in connection to England’s hosting of Europe’s women’s football championships.
- The shoe follows Rose’s 2022 project, a remaking of the England football shirt honoring its trailblazing female footballers.
The Nike x Martine Rose SHOX Mule MR4 began as an observation. While men’s national teams often arrive at international tournaments in bespoke tailoring, their female counterparts tend to travel in standard issue team tracksuits. As a spark of imagination, this imbalance spurred Martine Rose to imagine a new aesthetic dissolving the boundary between “getting off the plane and getting on the pitch.”
“We recognized a great opportunity to really focus on women and football and then make a trainer that is almost like a smart shoe,” says Rose.
Consistent with Rose’s practice, predicated on a play on proportion, the design stretches and pulls the SHOX R4 into a brand new mule shape. And the silhouette places renewed reverence on an everyday icon. “In the UK, SHOX are very closely associated with subcultures. The style has a real cache and resonance with youth culture,” says Rose. “It was really exciting to take something very familiar and culturally significant in a completely different sense.”
In redefining the SHOX as a “smart shoe,” Rose subtly highlights the inequality between men and women in sport, but also crafts a new object, re-writing the rules of football’s off-pitch subculture.
The Nike x Martine Rose SHOX Mule MR4 launches July 7 from www.martine-rose.com.
Martine Rose SHOX Mule MR4
