Rose Blake for Drake's

We speak to Rose Blake about our collection of collaborative pocket squares.

At just 29 years old, Rose Blake has managed to make quite the mark. The prolific artist and illustrator has had her intricate, quirky and characterful work featured in places as diverse as The New Yorker, The Groucho Club and The V&A. Drake’s is thrilled to now be a part of that illustrious list, with the launch of our new collaborative Rose Blake for Drake’s range of pocket squares.

The collection came about after Drake’s Creative Director Michael Hill met Blake at her exhibition ‘Now I Am An Artist’. “He was actually the first person to ever buy one of my proper pictures, which is quite a nice thing. We ended up having a meeting and he said he’d love to do a project with me in the future. It was Mike’s idea to do a range of pocket squares and I went off and thought about some ideas.”

Blake’s concept was to create a range of pocket squares that both reflect and could be worn by a series of different Drake’s-wearing men. “I came up with these six characters that would potentially wear Drake’s collections, which were the Seafarer, the Globetrotter, the Creator, the Thinker, the Stargazer and the Explorer. I made a pocket square for each character. And then I kind of had the idea that, because each character is linked in a certain way, other than them wearing Drake’s, they’re all linked by the sun or the moon.” Blake represents this with the repeated central circle motif that connects each of the pocket squares. “On the Creator’s one, for instance, it’s just on a drawing that he’s doing; The Thinker’s one is on the spine of a book on a bookshelf. Whatever they’re doing they’re linked by this concept. I like the idea of that repeating leitmotif.”

Each of the pocket squares will also ship with a signed illustration by Blake of the matching character. “When you get the pocket square, you’ll be able to see the character who’s wearing that pocket square, so he’s wearing Drake’s but also the thing that I’ve designed.”

Blake says she found working with the Drake’s aesthetic a natural fit. “I got sent all of the lookbooks and different jackets and stuff and that is like… my heaven. Everything is really nicely put together but it’s not too prissy. Drake’s almost seems like it’s a kind of club where ‘if you know, then you know’. It’s like a mutual understanding.”