arket and penny martin
Our collaboration with Penny Martin – a longtime friend of ARKET – explores notions of appropriateness, comfort, identity, and the dichotomies of everyone’s life: daytime versus evening, weekday versus weekend, casual versus formal. Ahead of autumn, when the work persona comes back into play, such reflections on dressing and identity become more pressing: How does the modern woman wish to show up without losing touch with her private self?
After over 20 years living and working in London, Penny relocated to Scotland, where she grew up, during the Pandemic. She settled in the coastal town of Cellardyke in Fife, ‘almost by mistake: I never intended to live here’. The move unlocked an unexpected appetite for quietude and reflection, while introducing a challenging new duality to her life. Maintaining her connection to the magazine’s offices in London involves a bi-weekly commute by sleeper train, and the member’s club where she stays when in town operates a dress code she says is “strict”. This she treats almost like a brief: ‘It’s something I think a lot more about now – place-appropriate dressing and the pleasures of circumventing those little rules.’
Penny was pursuing a career in museums and academia when, in 2001, she received an out-of-the-blue phone call from fashion photographer Nick Knight. He offered her three months of editing work, which ultimately led to seven years as the editor of Knight’s seminal fashion website, SHOWstudio. She describes the experience as transformative, shifting her outlook from critic to maker. ‘It was immensely pleasurable to suddenly be involved in the creation, rather than the deconstruction of a product.’
Now in her fifties, Penny Martin is Editor-in-Chief of The Gentlewoman, which she helped launch in 2010. Between its biannual issues, she consults to arts organisations and brands – she was one of the advisors who worked on the inception of ARKET – and has led talks at Venice Film Festival for over a decade. She still attends fashion shows, ‘a healthy number, though, not the 140 shows and presentations per season that I used to!’ When not at her desk in Fife, her days are filled with swims in Cellardyke’s tidal pool, trying to get ‘anything to grow’ in her sea garden and writing postcards and long letters: ‘Scottish people are such chatterboxes, we love communicating!’ To describe her interests as limited to fashion would be inaccurate. ‘I mean, even now, I don't really think of myself as a fashion editor. When people ask me about the magazine, I say it’s a women’s magazine. I really like clothes, but I’m most interested in people.’
