April 28, 2012 |
Back in 2006 you couldn’t open a magazine without seeing that dress. Go into a shop without seeing some pallid imitation hanging on a rail. And almost as suddenly as Roland seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, he was gone. Except that he never went away.
In the intervening years he has made it his mission to take control of his own destiny. From buying back his own name, designing stellar collection after stellar collection, to setting up shop and launching a new bridal range, Roland has been quietly creating on the fringes of the limelight to become the man every woman out there wants to be dressed by.
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Roland Mouret, you’ve been at Carlos Place for a year now, so I need to ask you, how does it feel?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I feel at home now. It’s really funny because before the store I was trapped in a situation where the only… Fashion is a game like tennis where you send the ball and if the press doesn’t send back the ball, it feels like you’re playing with yourself against the wall. Now the great thing about the store is I feel like I’m playing with other people, just straight.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “How does it feel, interacting? You’re able to judge what does well and what doesn’t do well. How does that feel? That level of control over what you do?”
ROLAND MOURET: “To have the information from the customer [what they think]… When I’m here I feel really whole as a designer, because it brings another inspiration to the collection. It allows me to have a new team of people work with me, like Angela who is the director of the store and brings me information from the customer. You know the way I work is all about the reality of the woman and to create the fantasy of the collection around that.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “I think a lot of designers don’t think about, ‘Okay, what’s the reality of this woman wearing these clothes? How is she going to move in them? What’s going to happen to them?’ Have you spent any time literally on the shop floor or at the tills?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Not at that level. I mean I don’t spend that time on the shop floor. I just spend my time meeting the customers and playing the role of the designer, which is part of the price of the outfit. As a designer you have to be able to pop out and give your appreciation of a woman wearing your outfit and create a magic moment in their life. It’s quite unique and I think they go home and think, ‘Wow! Roland was there! Advised me on my dress.’ Where they have a piece of you in a way.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “It’s like meeting a movie star, it gives you a special… ”
ROLAND MOURET: “It’s like a dream, it gives you a piece of a world you thought was not for everybody.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “It’s fantasy. You’re getting a very unique experience. What drew you to this environment? I mean, it’s not a shop. There’s no shop front. There are no windows, there are no mannequins. It’s quite nontraditional in the tradition of shopping.”
ROLAND MOURET: “I was quite interested in destroying the concept of the 1990s, where a concept store has to be this new thing in terms of technology and an attraction to create a queue of however many outside. I was not attracted to that. I was attracted to the idea of creating a concept that has the essence of luxury, which is privacy and service and even the hosting. My staff host the place. They are not employed by the company, they host the place. They have their customers who trust them, and I wanted a concept store based on different values. It was such a 21st-century thing. A lot of people told me, ‘Oh, you don’t have a window and it’s going to be difficult.’”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “I mean, traditional retailers panic about that.”
ROLAND MOURET: “It’s not difficult. The thing about the store is it’s not about quantity. We say, every walk-through we have, 70% buy something, which is great because you walk through a place where you feel like the moment you enter the room you feel at home and as though people will take care of you. And you leave with a bag… I mean, it’s never just one item.” SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “And when you thought about designing the store it was very much a private experience, it was about your vision for the store. Each item that exists there you have been 100% involved in. Every piece of art on the wall, every book… How do you feel about eventually creating, say, an interiors language of the Mouret experience?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I think I will always have that reflection of my customers’ life. I love the story of Ralph Lauren, when they opened the store. Whatever you think about the product – the space! The first space in New York you were like, ‘I want to live here! I don’t want to move out, and at Christmas I want to have the fire, and in summer I want to have fresh lemonade.’ And that’s the life of the customer.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Would you open a store anywhere else?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Where else?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I mean, anywhere at the moment, Paris, New York… ”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “And would it be the same idea as this house?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I love this house because it has an identity, and to find this place is like to meet someone in your life and you think that person is going to be how you imagined, and straightaway you have to realise there are things that are not what you expected and that aren’t going to change and they are things that are going to appear full time. It’s like this person is like that, and this house is the same. I feel I could go anywhere else and invade the space… establish a relationship with the space.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “You’ve created a DNA within your world that people like Azzedine… I don’t want to draw parallels… ”
ROLAND MOURET: “But there is parallel with two persons, and I think it’s Azzedine and Yohji Yamamoto. It’s the same with Yohji, who invade a space because they fall in love with it, and the place was like a cocoon that takes care of them, but you can move out of that place so easily and find a new space. I thought about it like that – I hate shops that are completely with no soul, where they have to create a plastic fitting inside. You don’t see the shape of the place, and they can replicate that mould everywhere in the world, and I can’t cope with that. I like the notion that it’s unique, and the next story will be as unique as this one.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “But, in a way, I think you could take your idea and translate it into an environment in a department store, like Azzedine has done in, say, Harrods, where his little section of the department has a polished concrete floor, and a Marc Newson chair and you know that’s indicative of his world.”
ROLAND MOURET: “I hate when you travel you find this globalisation of the world. I like to go to Hong Kong and believe they are going to still keep a bit of the French Quarter. In New York it’s the same thing, you want to keep a bit of what the city is about – every city you want to have that uniqueness, because if I don’t find that, the customer will travel and find that. They don’t want to travel from one city to another and find the same.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “No, as a shopper it can be frustrating. What would be nice is if each shop had a little evolution of the other. Different books, different art, so you are still the same but designed so you could buy into that world in a way. Curated slightly differently.”
ROLAND MOURET: “And to adapt yourself to an international customer, but at the same time people can live around the store. There is that place. I think the link of every one of my houses would be the French attitude.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “But what’s brilliant is – like Azzedine – it’s a destination store. You know you’re coming to shop here, you come to have the Roland Mouret experience specifically in this environment.”
ROLAND MOURET: “I think Mount Street, it’s becoming so easy to shop here now, you can go from Lanvin to Balenciaga, to Marc, have a tea or coffee at the Connaught. You will one day or other stop here. Some people have come inside and asked if it’s a hotel and if they could have a bed here!”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “But would you think about that? Four rooms here somewhere?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Not in London, but in another city. I would love that, because then I can stay there! You have to be practical for yourself first.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Bridal. Why?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Bridal is a project I’m doing because I wanted to do white dresses, I want to do that kind of love collection, that relationship a woman will have with a white dress. I want to make it less taboo. I want it to be a bit more sexy – that means no meringue! It’s a certain vision I have of bridalwear, because so many women have asked me, ‘Can you do the Galaxy dress in white for a wedding?’ There is a demand. We want to create a laidback, easy way, something that is about you and your partner – it’s not a dress you’re wearing because you want to please the family. It’s a one-to-one private relationship with a dress.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “When you’re designing a wedding dress for someone it’s for their most euphoric moment – I mean, besides giving birth – as a woman. It’s that moment when you’re happiest. So where you’re interacting with that person to make that dress, how does it differ from when you’re interacting with a normal customer?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Oh, that fear of not being good enough, that fear of being too big for the dress, it comes quite a lot with bridal moments. It’s that frustrated attitude, you have to please everybody. The first thing you’d like them to do is get married for themselves, but you get married because you want the support of the family. I think if you already had that support in the daytime dress from me, then it makes sense to want that even more from your wedding dress.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “I remember someone saying to me you’re going to be looking at that for the next 20 or more years, and that dress has such a big part to play in the dialogue of your family history, so as a designer it’s a huge responsibility.”
ROLAND MOURET: “My mother was not a virgin, she had my sister before, and so wore a wedding suit and that was quite a starting point of my work. To see your parents smiling and properly dressed.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Yes, formality.”
ROLAND MOURET: “I never understood where her veil was and I was with my mother once and I asked, ‘Where is your veil?’ and she showed me the curtain of the dining room. I was seven and I was like, ‘Wooooow.’”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “And I wanted to ask you is this now the next step to creating a bespoke range for people who come in and you design something specifically for them? Almost a couture collection?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I think everything is possible, but at the moment there is a time situation, where I have to be present and responsible for every project I’m doing. I’ve a lot on my plate with Clergerie, and I think before [couture] it would be accessories, shoes and bags, and bridal and cocktail, and I think the concept of me being more present for bespoke, I’d have to think seriously how this can happen. Perhaps there will be a window of opportunity, a period of time when I can be free for that.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “But customers will come and ask for this – it’s like adoring fans. Then they have an influence over what you do.”
ROLAND MOURET: “Well, it’s funny because when I did the live draping for Vogue’s Night Out and my birthday, the customers came with presents. It’s that sense of family, and being part of the same group – it’s amazing.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “You talked about Clergerie really quickly – how are you experiencing that at the moment? Obviously it’s a shoe collection and that’s something slightly to the left of what you’re doing now. How are you enjoying that process? Are you enjoying this process?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes, but at the moment I can’t talk about it.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Okay. So how long have you been thinking about doing accessories, because obviously it’s a natural progression to create your own bags and shoes? What about perfume, even? Where is that in your agenda of things to do?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I’ve realised in the journey of my success that if I don’t become a master of what I’m doing it doesn’t work in my business. I think the concept of the It dress and winning that award of it, you know – Anna Wintour told me that I created it and the market – I realise that I need to produce my other categories at that same level. Shoes – I will have to become a master of shoes in the same way I’m a master of dresses, because the two of them work together. As a master, Alaïa is proof because he is as much a master of the shoe as he is the dress. You know, you think of Alaïa and the first thing you think of is a woman on her tiptoes, and you have the curve of the tensed calf.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “When do you think you will be launching a perfume? Because that propels you into the world of an everyday person who can’t necessarily otherwise afford to buy into the brand.”
ROLAND MOURET: “I think it’s when that person has already spent money on a bag or shoe, the perfume is below all these prices, you have to go down that line of products and the end of this is the perfume.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “How involved are you on a scale of 1 to 10 – excuse the pun – in the design process? How much do you feel you can delegate? Be honest! You don’t delegate – he does not delegate!”
ROLAND MOURET: “As a collection in three dimensions I drape everything – to a point that I find it really easy to delegate different sides of the collection or different groups, If I have the right people around me. At the end it’s a job of being creative director, and I have no problem being creative director. I know how to drive people. You have to train a person and let them go and if a person can take 100% of the situation I trust them completely. But we need to be at a level of understanding that the person has to work in my way, but it’s their way at the same time. I think Tom did it quite well at Gucci, when you see how Christopher Bailey came out with Burberry with his own identity but still along the same lines as Tom Ford. After 10 years of working with me you can understand why a drape is there.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “But what I like about you is that your hand has physically touched every part of everything you designed. That’s why everything feels genuinely part of your vision.”
ROLAND MOURET: “If I were to send just a drawing to China, have the dress produced and afterwards have a strong advertising campaign and make you believe it’s luxury, it’s generic, people will walk past it. Yesterday I was doing a dress that I thought was fantastic but it was not mine. I said it’s beautiful but it’s not mine. If it’s hanging on the rack and you pass by, you need to say, ‘It’s a Roland Mouret.’ So I changed the bottom of the dress and straightaway it felt right. Identity is important and I feel sad for designers who don’t have that.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Yes, schizophrenic. There are lots of designers where, season to season, you don’t know who’s designed it.”
ROLAND MOURET: “It’s like my sexuality. I don’t want to change, I am myself and I try to have the best pleasure one time after another.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “I read something fabulous once where you said 80% of the time you’re straight and 20% of the time you’re not.”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes, this job has allowed me to be straight by day.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Yes, because what’s fabulous about you as a designer is that you think about the women who wear the clothes. You can be fat, tall, small… She’s a gamut of people.”
ROLAND MOURET: “When I design I think of privacy, a unique relationship of two people, a man and a woman, for a dress. Sensuality, sex, but everything through that, [you] don’t want to show it to the rest of the world. That is more like how a straight man will think about his partner.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Yes, because the way you design a dress, my husband has to help me get into it or out of it. There’s a closing of the envelope and there’s the opening of the envelope. Which is his personal experience of that dress, which is amazing.”
ROLAND MOURET: “That’s why I think you have to learn to touch people. When you stay a long time with a person, clothes become a tool of your seduction. When your zipping a person in and out of a garment it’s allowing you to touch someone.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Yes, in a legitimate way as well.”
ROLAND MOURET: “It’s not like cooking, you say pass me the bread. It’s not like making a roast. It’s that kind of private moment, you don’t zip it up in front of the kids, the family. There is something really private about it. I think a guy zipping his wife into a dress before they go out, most of the time he’ll think, ‘Oh, I’m going to take her out of this at the end of the evening.’ The dress becomes a tool. When I used to make dresses for the American market it’s not seen as practical, but now you can zip it, they are over it.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “And do you ever have anxiety about relevance?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I’ve realised that most of the time I’m either before the trend or after the trend. What I’ve noticed recently is so many people start to lose it at a certain part of their life. You start to age with your customer and your customer doesn’t gamble on you as much because gambling on you is making them old, too. I won’t name any names, but you used to see good people supporting, but now you see no one.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “I think it’s sad when you see that there is so much that’s new, that established designers fall by the wayside like debris, like the skeletons of what was. I find that irritating, because to me there is always a discussion about a designer that has consistency, that has a vision and focus, but ultimately you know you can get whatever you want to happen if you have an ad campaign. How do you feel about that relationship?”
ROLAND MOURET: “I think that must be an amazing tool, but at the same time you can cut yourself to it. I can’t say it’s all good or bad, but I think Karl Lagerfeld, at his age, is still trendy, and the way he works and positions himself to absorb and produce trendiness and approach youth to keep his own youth, it’s fantastic. But I think however much you do that, one day there is a crack in the mirror, and that crack comes one day or another and one day you will be out of it. We’ve seen designers who were pushed… ”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Through the looking glass.”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes. It’s like they came in a big door and were pushed through small door.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “It’s like an actor who has lost his lustre, in a way.”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Do you ever feel there is a trade-off for growing bigger? A relinquishing of some of the freedom that you had in the beginning of your career, when you could be less easily judged, in a way? When the Galaxy dress was created, there was, of course, that expectation for you to create the next one and the next one.”
ROLAND MOURET: “You know there is this speed now, there’s the press speed and customer speed, and if my customer reads the magazine and buys just what’s in the magazine I shouldn’t have a customer. Especially the years before I shouldn’t have a customer because my presence in the British press was quite – how do we say? – average. But customers don’t live like that, they know better… They know what feeds their lives. The great thing these days is that the show is not the final product, the show is just one small part.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “The tip of the iceberg?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Not even, it’s a small tool in the development. The tip of the iceberg is the woman wearing the dress. There are some designers who still do their job for the show only. For me the show is a tool.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “A means to an end.”
ROLAND MOURET: “It’s so funny seeing the difference of real women trying the clothes, how the volumes change and talk differently. Most of the time you have a memory of an icon with a real woman, a Sophia Loren, a woman from Hollywood.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “How do all the women you work with influence or inform how your collection evolves from season to season? Because we’re all part of your world, but we’re all quite different in terms of our body shapes and… ”
ROLAND MOURET: “They are brilliant. They are not women who wear clothes just to fluff around in their houses. I remember working in my old company and Sharon was wearing the dress and she said, ‘As long as I can do this [Smoothes hair.], this [Pretends to light cigarette.] and this [Pretends to sip drink.], then the dress fits.’ Which was quite fantastic, but it’s changed. I’ve moved on. It’s great to be influenced by women and take on their body demands. There are body demands such as I want to cover my arms, I want to show my cleavage, I have to work all day, I need to stretch… I want to be sexy. The length of the dress is… ”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Crucial!”
ROLAND MOURET: “The customer drives the demand and I drive an answer.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Do you think that’s what keeps you going – the idea of what your clients need comes above everything else?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yeah, because it would piss me off if, tomorrow, you don’t have my dress anymore to wear. It would piss me off for you to say the only dress I’m wearing is the one you did five years ago because you didn’t do a new dress. How can I be alive and chatting with you and not doing that dress of the season that you want in your wardrobe, because that’s such a big part of my life? My purpose is to bring that to a woman’s life. I will retire and I will do something else, but my purpose is to do what I’m doing. At the moment, and I speak as an artist, my creative research – and the frustration and how you stay with someone and how you face adversity and how you stay with someone and my work – is one the tools [for finding] the answers to this situation.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Are you selling a vision? I think you are.”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes, I think it’s the vision of what the universal body shape of a woman is, what women think they should be from seven years old to 97. That’s the body shape they think they should be.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “I know I keep talking about the Galaxy dress, but I’ve got to go there – a thousand different women wore it, but it became individual to each woman.”
ROLAND MOURET: “There is a style of woman I dress. I dress women who enjoy being women. There are some women who are fantastic and don’t want to show their curves, but I think there is a moment where they accept their curves. I still think there is universal shape. It’s waist, hips and an amount of muscle and fat you have on the body and that’s what you need to accept.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “What I loved about that one collection is the waspies you made, which defined that body image.”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes, we did that because, with the models, that body shape was not there. And all the girls stole them after the show! Do you remember the carnage backstage when all the girls were there in their waspies? It was fantastic!”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “What does a day in the life of Roland Mouret look like?”
ROLAND MOURET: “A lot of sweat, nerves, spots on your back, control of food because you could forget to eat. A lot of shouting.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Have you become more short tempered as the years have gone on?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes. I am more and more impatient.”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “If you could click your fingers, what would you make happen?”
ROLAND MOURET: “My dad was telling me when I was young, go to buy a pint of milk, and then [would] say, ‘You’re not back?!’”
SOPHIA NEOPHITOU: “Hahahaha! You’re your father’s son?”
ROLAND MOURET: “Yes!”
by Sophia Neophitou
Photographer Frederike Helwig
