There was a whole clutch of elegant women clad in Roland Mouret who were sitting in the front row of the designer's show this morning. It's worth making a note of that, because at this point, it's clear that those women are coming to Mouret for a very particular look: one that's body-conscious, graphic, and—at least of late—premised on a kind of origami-like construction. All those signatures were in play today; what felt fresh here was the sense of rawness, evidenced both in the collection's dissonant colors and in the roughed-together look of the construction. A number of these clothes looked as though they'd sprung to life via Mouret grabbing a handful of fabric and pinning the crumple, or folding a bolt of fabric over, stapling it together, and calling it a skirt. Naturally, there was a lot more to these garments' creation than that—some of those folded-over skirts, for instance, were all patchworked leather—but Mouret's intention was to conjure something improvisational, and he achieved that. Strips of black patent leather that read like gaffer tape helped to underline the effect. You can debate how much relevance these clothes would have outside the Mouret fan club, but for that group of women, there was without a doubt a lot here to like.
