October 16, 2024 |
“It was really symbolic,” says Roland Mouret of the portrait portfolio he created for this issue of 10 Men. After a period of professional and personal upheaval, it was an opportunity for the designer to express both who he is now and who he wants to be. “I did it for me, for the person I think is going to live the future of my life,” he says.
coat by GUCCI
“I didn’t have to create a character. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be myself,” he tells me over breakfast in Little House Mayfair in central London. “That was my challenge. Can I do that project and be myself and be accepting at 62?” he says with characteristic frankness. “I closed a lot of doors in the last three years, but with this project, straight away a new one opened, and I never expected to go in this direction now.”
Nothing in life stays the same for ever. For Mouret, a cascade of changes came in quick succession. First his beloved dog, Dave, died, then in November 2020, Covid crashed his business. A year later it was bought out of administration by Self-Portrait’s Han Chong, who kept Mouret on as creative director.
Then, as he was managing the transition from running his own brand to becoming an employee, his 13-year marriage to the artist James Webster ended, forcing Mouret to sell their beloved house in Suffolk, with its thatched roof, artist’s studio, acres of land and natural swimming pool.
blazer and trousers by PRADA
These blows would be enough to sink a less resilient person, but not Roland. “I thought I would go into the future with a company that was worth £30 million. I thought I was going to go with a house in Suffolk. An amazing dog and an amazing, amazing husband… and all of that… changed,” he says not with bitterness or regret, but acceptance.
He now lives in a chic two-bed in North London, having taken just a few prized possessions with him and selling or giving away everything else. Including clothes, although he couldn’t part with his beloved Dubarry boots. They’re now living at a friend’s place in Dorset, awaiting his next visit. That process of letting go, he says, was cathartic.
“The only way you can react is by purging yourself, like a reset, rejecting everything to allow yourself to start again because the rules of the past are not at all what’s going to make you survive.
“I closed so many doors. Even if it was imposed on me, I closed them. I went for it and said, ‘I’m accepting that closure because I’m going to open another one.’ You need to understand how to finish something and be objective about it to learn something from that past [so you can] move on.”
coat by DIOR MEN
It allowed him to redefine himself and recognise a side he’d never acknowledged before. “All my life I was trying to be seen. From the moment when I was a young kid and going to Paris and becoming a model, you project an image,” he says. That need only intensified when he moved to London and segued into fashion design, after modelling and running his own club nights at Soho’s Freedom Café (now Freedom Bar). He remembers one of his most visible moments, walking the stairs at the Met Gala in 2015 with Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was wearing his design of course: the image of success. “You have to represent, you have to project, and for the ones who couldn’t… they didn’t make it,” he says of his design contemporaries. Fashion, he reflects, is good at selling an illusion, but buyer beware. He likens it to a gorgeous mirror ball spinning seductively in the sky. “You believe in the mirror ball without knowing what’s inside,” he says. “Because the moment the chain breaks, the mirror ball will crash on to the floor. It’s broken indefinitely if there is no strength inside to bounce back. And I think London is full of broken mirror balls.”
Right up to the point when his business came crashing down, Mouret was very good at playing the fashion game. With his matinee idol good looks, sensual designs and famous clients (including Kate Winslet, Meghan Markle, Cameron Diaz, Halle Berry and Victoria Beckham), he crafted an image that still powers the Roland Mouret brand today. “I succeeded in a certain way by making my dress more famous than me,” he says of his signature Galaxy dress, a universally flattering hourglass number that took the red carpet by storm and was copied high and low. “I know what it is to face the dance with the big players,” he says of that heady time.
from left: scarf by WOOYOUNGMI, coat by BOTTEGA VENETA
“When you become a public person, it’s a character. It’s the better version of yourself, of what you would like to be. It’s a version, but it’s never completely you,” he says. Covid and the administration forced a reckoning. After being so entwined with the brand he’d created, he emotionally detached to allow the Roland he is now to emerge. “Who was I?” he asks. The shoot for 10 Men was an opportunity to answer that most existential of questions. “It was about me. It was not about the company, it was not about all the women I dressed. No, it was about me because, now, I don’t have that need to be seen and recognised, but I have the need to see myself.”
He loved the process of mixing pieces from his own archive with looks from the AW collections. The grey Dior Men coat he wears in one shot reminded him of the little grey coats that the nuns used to wear at his Catholic school in Lourdes, in the south of France, while the process of working closely with a photographer to create a memorable image took him back to his modelling days in the 1980s.
Some of his earliest designs were based on the apron his father, a butcher, used to wear, and that act of wrapping yourself in protection is something he still holds dear. “There is a sense of heritage,” he says of how he styles himself now.
“I wear more and more scarves on my shoulders like my grandmother did, but I wear a Palestinian scarf to support the movement,” he says. “When it rains, I put it on my head. The rain doesn’t go through it. And that’s something I learned from my uncle when we were keeping the sheep in the mountain.”
jacket and trousers by GIORGIO ARMANI
Mouret has passed through the eye of a personal and professional storm. He feels kindred with other designers who have emerged on the other side of stellar fashion careers. “I have much respect for Stefano [Pilati] and Miguel Adrover. Because the two of them have the same pattern as me. They’ve been fashion designers. They’ve been working for brands. By coming out of it, you see now the way they deal with clothes. It’s more than inspiring. It’s pure identity. It’s a language. I think the language of dressing up is coming back. It’s like poetry.”
With all the upheaval, he’s changed physically, losing 12kg in two months and growing a handlebar moustache. “I like the roundness on my lip. I like to bite the hair in my mouth,” he says. Inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis’s Bill the Butcher (from Scorsese’s Gangs of New York), ’70s porn stars and Les Brigades du Tigre (1975-83), a French TV police drama set in 1913, it also represents a kind of masculinity untouched by gay culture’s beefcake-on-steroids aesthetic.
Another side effect of these huge life changes is Mouret’s recalibrated relationship with youth and age. “Youth is your worst friend,” he cautions. “Youth is going to be pushing you to not deal with things, to party, to forget the problems, just go with it. But one day, youth will not be there. And you really do have to deal with it.” He’s going out more now and would also like to see more intergenerational exchanges and interactions in the gay community. “If a younger gay man sees an older man at the bar, speak to him and ask how it was for them when they were young. Start to create a heritage, so you’re not just throwing out one generation after the next.”
jacket by LOUIS VUITTON
His past, present and future coexist in one, frank image, when he holds three rings in his open hands: his wedding ring, which belonged first to his father (“It still has all the marks of the knife when he cut himself as a butcher”), his “standing alone” ring, given to him by his ex-husband, and his cock ring, which he’s had for 34 years. He takes all three into the future with him with characteristic openness.
Looking forward, Mouret describes himself as “someone who is excited to go for the next 10 years, but not excited as a 20-year-old. I’m excited as a 60-year-old going into the future. I’m excited to really understand my purpose.” The past few years have not been easy. He still sees a counsellor for talking therapy and his philosophy now is “just be yourself and open all the doors you never opened. That’s where my brain is.” Accepting who you are is a necessity, “like breathing. The more I can accept, the better I feel.”
With that in mind, he’s connecting back to the arty child he once was, the kid who was good with his hands. Fashion is only one part of his creative practice; as well as making art, he’s writing a memoir. For Roland Mouret, it’s a new chapter, and the story is far from over.
from left: shirt by WOOYOUNGMI, coat by DIOR MEN
coat by DIOR MEN
10 Men Issue 60 – ECCENTRIC, FANTASY, ROMANCE – is out now. Order your copy here.
Photographer JERMAINE FRANCIS
Fashion Editor and Talent ROLAND MOURET
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Co-creative director ALAIN PICHON using Kevin Murphy
Sittings editor MET KILINC
Fashion assistant GEORGIA EDWARDS
Production SONYA MAZURYK
