Archie M. Alled-Martinez

Archie M. Alled-Martinez is a Spanish fashion designer born in Barcelona in 1990. He moved to London at nineteen and studied at Central Saint Martins, specialising in knitwear before completing the MA Fashion Knitwear course in 2018. That year he received an LVMH Graduate Prize and moved to Paris, where he worked at Givenchy until June 2019.

Alled-Martinez subsequently launched his own label, ALLED-MARTINEZ, and presented its early collections during Paris men’s fashion activity. The project treats knitwear as a complete wardrobe medium, using engineered knits to construct tailoring and other categories associated more commonly with woven cloth. His work has gained attention for technical control, queer references and a close relationship between cut and specialised knitting.

Karl Lagerfeld invited Alled-Martinez into a collaboration released in June 2022. Developed with the house, the gender-neutral capsule combined his knitwear expertise and pared-back tailoring with Karl Lagerfeld’s monochrome Paris codes. The project expanded his material field and preserved his authorship as an external collaborator.

Alled-Martinez treats knitwear as construction. He pushes it beyond sweaters or soft layers, engineering knitted fabric into jackets, trousers and pieces that echo denim or formal tailoring. The technical challenge is central to the appearance of the clothes, with structure built through yarn, tension and pattern development before surface embellishment enters the picture.

His visual references often come from Barcelona, nightlife, queer culture and early-2000s fashion. These references appear through close fits, exposed bodies, metallic or glittering surfaces and a deliberate play with familiar ideas of masculine dress. The cut is usually controlled, allowing cultural reference to sit on a garment whose proportions remain clear.

The Karl Lagerfeld collaboration gave him a broader material field and kept that precision intact. He worked with gender-neutral wardrobe pieces and reduced detailing to strong silhouettes, using the house’s monochrome identity as a framework. The capsule demonstrates his interest in taking a recognisable category, stripping it to structural essentials and rebuilding it through specialised technique.