The American selling the Italian dream
Charlie Gowans-eglinton meets J J Martin, the woman who has Milanese style, from the dress to the aperitivo, down pat
There is something of a military commander about JJ Martin as she inspects the wood-panelled room in Liberty that is currently home to La Double J’s first London pop-up shop. Scanning the rails of clothes, her eyes fall on the table at the room’s centre, laid with the brand’s newly launched crockery and linens. Bread plates have been stacked on top of dinner plates, pudding plates on the left: navy and red geometrics have been paired with lemon yellow peacocks. “I don’t think they quite got it,” Martin half laughs, half sighs, as she begins to lay the table as intended – clashing, but harmoniously so. When you are playing with this much print, everything needs to be in its place.
A customer beelines towards a pink silk ankle-length T-shirt dress covered in a 1900s wallpaper print. There are shop assistants within hearing – two, in fact, perhaps drawn over by the sight of 5ft 10in JJ casually rearranging their displays – but Martin can’t resist. “Have you seen it in yellow?” she asks, plucking the dress’s yellow velvet sister from another rail. And when the customer emerges from the changing room: “Can you lift your arms? It might be a little small in the shoulder, maybe.” There is no hard sell – but then, Martin, elegant in matching skirt and shirt under a black cardigan, is sales tactic enough. “I love your skirt,” the customer asks.
“Do you have it here?”
What began in 2015 as a website selling Martin’s collection of vintage clothes and jewellery has come a long way. Realising that she couldn’t make a living from one-offs, she paired up with one of Lake Como’s oldest silk manufacturers, Mantero. “Dior – Mr Christian Dior – was using them, Mr Yves Saint Laurent was using them. Recently, I was in there and I saw reams of Vuitton; but these brands never speak about them.
And I found that so sad, especially in light of how much Italy is losing in terms of its artisanship, and all of what they excel in, now that so much of it is being outsourced to Portugal, Romania or China.”
An emphasis on home-grown Milanese talent – from Mantero’s archive prints to the Italian women profiled on the site, women who stood in as models when the company was too poor to afford them – runs through all that Martin does. Which is why it’s surprising that she’s not homegrown herself, but an American: JJ stands for Jessica Jane. “I grew up with a hunter fisherman father and an extremely athletic mother, and there was no one in my family that even had a speckle of culture, fashion, beauty, taste – nothing.
My brothers… one of my brothers is a professional beach volleyball player.
We come from a very different world,” she laughs.
Moving from her native Los Angeles to
New York, Martin was working in marketing at Calvin Klein when she met Italian
Andrea Ciccoli at a party. A year later, she followed him to Milan.
“When I first arrived, he [Ciccoli] was like, you can’t eat like that.
He’s not very rule-based, but he had this one thing: he taught me how to hold my fork and knife properly. Americans are terrible, I’ve got to tell you. And now when
I eat with my family, I have to say, ‘You can’t eat like that!’ I’m glad that he told me, because he’s right. And now, when I watch Lindsay Lohan with her fork and knife…” she laughs. After
three months of Italian classes, a chance meeting with Godfrey Deeny, the then European editor at large of Fashion Wire Daily (an early fashion news site), gave Martin her entry into journalism. “Back then, in 2001, the Italians didn’t even have websites. Nobody invited me to anything. It was a very valuable exercise in ego management,” she quips. Martin went on to write for The International Herald Tribune, Harper’s Bazaar
USA, and Wallpaper.
“It wasn’t until I moved to Italy at age 28 that I really got a proper fashion education. These women would glide by on their bicycles wearing Prada skirts and these perfectly starched white shirts and these little kitten heels and sunglasses, and they looked like they were out of a Fellini movie. I come from Los Angeles, where everyone is walking around from morning to night in their yoga pants, and in Italy, no one is wearing exercise clothes. Ever. No one is exercising.” She laughs. “That’s a downside.”
It was the Milanese women’s ability to balance work and home that really struck her, though. “In America I saw women that were total career girls, and their home lives were disasters. But here in Italy, they had these amazing jobs and yet they were obsessed with the house: the aperitivo had to be like this, the table needed to be set like that, the food – they were domestic goddesses as well as corporate warlords.”
The last few years have been about finding that balance. Martin now meditates twice a day, she does yoga most mornings – not the aggressive kind she practised in LA, but a calmer, “yin” form. “I go into the office at 12pm, never before. So from the moment I wake up until 12pm, I’m doing my own thing. I had to carve out that time. I quit all the magazines, I’m no longer a journalist. I’m doing this full time, but I make that time for myself.”
She shares not only an apartment but an office building with her husband who, five years ago, co-founded The Level Group, which handles the logistics of taking luxury fashion brands online. Martin couldn’t have asked for better help in building her own business, with his in-house creative agency and team of graphic designers within shouting distance. Have they managed to keep their personal and professional lives separate, I ask. “Are you kidding me? It’s totally bled together. We’re an Italian family: screaming at breakfast, kissing at lunch…”
The pop-up is at Liberty until Nov 23, but womenswear will be stocked for all season
‘These women – they were domestic goddesses as well as corporate warlords’