Resort is always a good time to drop in on Roland Mouret and hear what’s on his mind. “I don’t think it’s about clothes anymore. It’s about values. What you stand for,” he says. As is Mouret’s practice, the clothes he’s presenting are hanging now in his flagship store—he’s stuck to the see-now-buy-now model for interim collection releases. It works for his customers, who flow through his Carlos Place townhouse, looking to top up on his signature dresses with their rippling asymmetries, the useful coats in cheerful pops of color, and his blouses, trousers, and jackets with their drapey fits.
But like everyone else who’s involved in the production of fashion, it’s the bigger issues he’s reviewing—not so much the style of the season, as how to step up to the responsibilities that climate change is bringing home. “My generation of designers has tripled the number of collections we do; we’ve gone from two to six a year,” he observes. “That’s the speed, the rhythm of it.” It’s a system—the premise of eternal growth that took over in the years of globalization—that Mouret describes as coming to an end. “The last 10 years were easy,” he says, frankly. “It was sell, sell, sell.”
But how to operate while putting a brake on the insanity of that machine? Looking internally, Mouret has been auditing his business, whittling down the options he shows wholesale buyers. Doing too much, trying to please everyone, is a slippery slope to losing focus anyway, he says. “We calculated the overflow, analyzed the spec sheets, reduced it down.” As someone who can look down the long perspective of history, it’s a return to resourcefulness, which hardly feels unnatural. “It’s what we all did in the ’90s,” he laughs. “When we had nothing!”
That’s one way to regain a grip on his identity as a brand—less waste, more rationality, concentrating on what contemporary women might need after years of excessive consumption. Meanwhile, Mouret is using his platform to champion an aspect of progress on a peer-to-peer basis. He was eager to draw attention to the Blue Arch & Hook hangers, a trademarked brand made entirely from recycled marine plastics, which the Resort clothes were displayed on. Diverting the fashion industry away from the single-use hangers that are currently used in the transportation of clothes—unseen by consumers—is a solution he’s actively championing through a campaign partnered by The British Fashion Council. It’s a no-brainer for anyone who’s waking up to the fact that 85% of plastic hangers go into landfills, he says. “We can all do this, and clean up the ocean too,” he says. “And that makes me happy.”
