Nike and Martine Rose unveils SHOX Mule MR4

London-based designer Martine Rose has unveiled the Nike x Martine Rose SHOX Mule MR4, her second collaboration with the footwear and sportswear giant.

Described as "redefining sport for a new generation of athletes", the new footwear will be available from tomorrow, 7 July, to coincide with the Uefa Women’s Euro 2022.

The designer subtly highlights the inequality between men and women in sport with the Shox MR4, whilst also re-writing the rules of football’s off-pitch subculture.

Men’s national teams often arrive at international tournaments in bespoke tailoring, female counterparts tend to travel in standard issue team tracksuits. This imbalance spurred Rose to imagine a new aesthetic dissolving the boundary between “getting off the plane and getting on the pitch.”

The shoe follows Rose’s 2022 project, a remaking of the England football shirt honouring its trailblazing female footballers.

The campaign features nine women, all selected by Rose, who have changed attitudes in football, including Hope Powell, England’s first female and black manager, Kat Craig, a human rights lawyer who supports sexual abuse victims in football and duo Khartoum Dembelé and Founé Diawara, founders of Les Hijabeuses, who created a safe space for female Muslim footballers after the French football federation banned hijabs.

Rose said: "We recognised a great opportunity to really focus on women and football and then make a trainer that is almost like a smart shoe. In the UK, SHOX are very closely associated with subcultures. The style has a real cache and resonance with youth culture. It was really exciting to take something very familiar and culturally significant in a completely different sense.”