FOR GENTLEWOMAN AND COUNTRY: The Gentlewoman’s editor Penny Martin has been living in Fife, Scotland, a coastal county, since 2021 and it has made her rethink the contents of her wardrobe.
“Previously, you could boil my personal style into a sort of grown-up school uniform, navy lady, but now I’ve got some particular challenges as I have an informal life by the seaside, where it’s not really polite to turn up in quite aggressive fashion,” she said in an interview, explaining that her capsule collection with Arket takes town, shore and country into consideration
Martin worked on the development of Arket in 2016 before the brand launched in August 2017.
Penny Martin for Arket.
Walkers pass by her front door all day clad in walking shoes, Patagonia outfits and trekking poles in hand.
“That’s how people dress here. It’s beyond workwear, it’s walking wear,” Martin explains.
Her small collection isn’t exactly for walking, but it’s one that’s versatile enough to wear to the pub or a fancy private member’s club. The capsule includes a double-face cashmere skirt suit; a black blazer; a thick roll neck; high-waist and wide-leg chinos; three-quarter-length cashmere coats; a pair of Derby shoes; a wool crêpe dress; a travel blanket, and a silk square.
The latter has become a habit of Martin’s. She’s been wearing Hermès squares as a means to stop her rough Scottish knitwear from scratching her neck.
Penny Martin for Arket.
“The design team at Arket made the scarf with me as they believed that was one of my personal style codes. A bit grand for me to say I’m so associated with Hermès silk squares,” she says.
One side of the silk scarf is made up of waves, while the other is straight and rigid — encapsulating Martin’s two worlds. The scarf also uses the colors black and navy, a rule that Martin loves to break because she wasn’t allowed to wear the two together at school.
The silk scarf bears resemblance to the one Phoebe Philo wore on the cover of The Gentlewoman’s debut issue in 2010. The fashion designer wears a Celine silk scarf and was shot by David Sims. “In the [photo] studio, they were teasing me saying, ‘it’s like your silk scarves.’ But I should say, I only had two of them — I probably just wore them a lot,” Martin remembers.
Penny Martin for Arket.
Arket approached her last fall and the 52-year-old thought it would be purely on an editing basis, where she would select a few stylish pieces. But once her conversations with the design team started, it went past solution based dressing — she started dissecting the nuances of personal style, such as questioning how a sleeve is rolled up or which part of a woman’s skin is most important to be bare in an outfit.
The granular questions resulted in a collection that’s led by Martin’s own personal style rather than trends. It’s also an edit of pieces she can wear on the five hour train journey from Fife to London, and to the various European cruise shows.
She admits that she’s a nonbeliever in clothes that are “too relaxed” when traveling — a lesson she’s learned from experience.
When she was making her way down to the Gucci cruise show in London from a yoga retreat on the Isle of Islay in May, her luggage was lost.
“The idea of traveling in sweat is a false economy. The concept of the collection was defined by town and country, which is really a way of living that I suppose we haven’t really thought about since the ‘40s,” says Martin.
She continues to ponder the answers to “what is the new formal? What is the new informal? And what is appropriate for traveling without being caught out?”
