Some 20-odd years ago, Roland Mouret founded his label on the idea of intimacy, what women really wanted, and how he could make it for them, which often involved cutting, draping, and folding his clothes directly onto the body. That’s still, all this time later, what drives his work. Maybe even more so these days, given that we live, as Mouret says, in the era of the “too much”: too much clothing, too much choice, too much in the way of seasons, and messaging, and sheer, relentless, never-ending fashion noise.
“I think during the pandemic, there were so many clothes that just lay there, in stores, good clothes, but still, just clothes,” Mouret said via a zoom call. “I feel we have the concept of collections wrong now: Women know how to evolve their style, they know how to build a wardrobe. What we need to do is come up with something in the moment that reflects our personalities as designers—and see what relationship we have with who’s buying them.
So, it is not so much, ‘I need a new dress’; instead, it is, ‘I need a piece of that person in my life’.” Of course, as the roiling turnover of creative directors and the houses they work for heats up—can you even keep up right now, because sometimes I am not sure even I can, and I work in the industry!—that’s a salient point; maybe we do want the name of the designer as much, if not more, than the name of the house, contrary to what some might have us believe. In Mouret’s case, he’s now backed b.
