There are so many rabbit holes in the fields of fashion reviewing. Roland Mouret tipped me down one when he had me leaning over an iPad looking at his Resort collection at his Carlos Place store. “It’s inspired by Lartigue and his love affair with Renee Perle,” Mouret declared. And so: Whoops, 10 minutes later, I was down the Wiki rabbit hole, looking for Perle. She transpired to be a perfect oval-faced, long-limbed, Marcel-waved model, posing sportily around the South of France in the early 1930s, wearing palazzo pants and tank tops and stripe-y sweaters. Little seems to be known about her, except that she is thought to have been Romanian Jewish. All very interesting—since France during the soon-to-come Nazi occupation was a terrible time (read Les Parisiennes by Anne Sebba for horrifying accounts of what happened to women) and . . . well, this burrowing must stop!
Back up in the light of today, in Mouret’s store, his Resort collection is hanging on racks ready for winter escapes. Maybe it’s the breezy, mobile spirit of the clothes that captures something of the ’30s in Mouret’s mind? He talked about the attitude of “pajama dressing,” so that an emerald green hammered-silk blazer becomes super-supple, and about the dynamism of the flyaway, asymmetric print dresses.
Whatever; Mouret can’t be categorized as a designer who deals in high concept or whimsical fantasy. The reason he’s still in business after 20 years is his rapport with his customers—many of whom are the émigrés and visitors of many nations who cluster so conspicuously in London’s luxury shopping thoroughfares these days. Mouret is in a position that has developed organically—and pretty spectacularly—you might say. Because when he first arrived in London from Paris in the ’80s, it was a far scuzzier place, and he was but a club boy and model who made lots of friends in the music business. He has recently been looking back over those changing times. On the desk next to his iPad was a copy of his new book, Roland Mouret: Provoke, Seduce, Attract, the story of his beginnings as the son of a butcher in Lourdes, through his first experiments with draping, folding, and pinning dresses in the late ’90s, to the explosion of acclaim that came with his Galaxy dress in the aughts. Looking at his clothes now, the origami folds and handkerchief hems of his past collections are discernible signatures, but all is now fluidity.
