It’s about 5am, a cold Saturday morning, on a runway at Luton airport. Around 40 assorted fashion people, dressed head-to-toe in Martine Rose, are waiting to take off for Ayia Napa. Martine — waiting for us in Cyprus — has assembled her friends and family and collaborators for a night of UK garage-soundtracked wildness to celebrate her latest Napapijri collaboration in the resort town with Slam Jam and Agency Eleven.
On the plane a stag do down shots in their matching shirts but most of the assorted fashion people grab a couple of hours sleep before the ensuing party. We land in gorgeous, soft, sunshine. Off season, Ayia Napa has a ramshackle, slightly beaten down feeling to it: an echo of former glories, a sense of calm before a storm. A few scattered tourists and families litter the hotel as we all bowl in.
Ayia Napa has a special resonance in the history of clubbing and dance music in the UK. This Levantine analogue to Ibiza, which, for a few heady summers around the turn of the millenium erupted as a centre for Brits abroad, pumped up on brave new sounds of 2-step and garage. More infamously, Ayia Napa was the 2003 site of one of grime’s foundational myths. It’s where Dizzee Rascal was stabbed six times, allegedly by a member of garage supremos So Solid Crew. Dizzee survived but garage didn’t, really, and grime blossomed in its place, a rougher, harder, more anxious sibling. Dizzee won the Mercury Prize for his debut album a few months later. But garage is in the veins of Ayia Napa, and it’s that current which Martine’s celebrating. Billed as “an exclusive 24-hour experience” — Martine gathered Heartless Crew, Martelo and Oneman to play at legendary Ayia Napa venue Club Black N’ White (it’s Heartless Crew’s first set on the island since 2010). Martine and her crowd of garage legends ride off on a load of quad bikes.
“We had the idea for the party when we shot the campaign for this season’s collaboration,” Martine says. “It was never the intention, but as we were shooting, the imagery we were creating started to feel really familiar. It was like looking at an old garage club-night flyer. So we started joking around about doing ‘Napa in Napa’. So we just thought — why not? Let’s go to Ayia Napa. It’s a fucking great idea. It's such an experience, so English in a way and nostalgic, and so important to dance music history. It was the centre of everything for a while. It just snowballed.”
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