When we think of fashion, we don’t think of a butcher’s shop. But maybe we should. The French designer Roland Mouret grew up around his father’s butcher shop in a mountain village in the rural southwest not far from Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous. Today, Bernadette is a saint of the Roman Catholic Church and Lourdes a place where the faithful afflicted come to pray for miracles and bathe in its spring.
Meanwhile, Mouret experienced something of a miracle of his own, leaving the countryside and the expectation of succeeding his father in the shop for a career in fashion in Paris.
But in many ways, his early experience in his father’s shop would be the making of him as a designer, one who remains a favorite of ours as Mary Jane Denzer. Working with meat gave him what his website calls a “fearless” approach to flesh – and cutting and folding. (It’s no surprise that he is known as the “king of curve” and a master of drapery.) His country upbringing also influenced his choice of fabric.
“My clothes are for a city life,” he observes, “yet in the wools and textures of the countryside.”
In other ways, though, the country mouse became a city slicker. He hung out under a streetlamp outside the impossible-to-get-into nightspot Le Palace, wearing a handmade blue “Zazou” suit accessorized by a cigarette, waiting for fate to say, “Come in.” When it did, he worked as a model, stylist and art director. But after 10 years, he needed a change. Mouret found it in London, where he decided to put his knowledge of cutting and talent for drapery to the test as a self-taught fashion designer inspired by Azzedine Alaia and Yohji Yamamoto, for whom he modeled.
“One day, I realized ‘I’m 36 and, if I don’t try by 40, I’m going to be bitter,” he said of his 1997 beginnings.
He expanded and foundered, bouncing back with his Galaxy dress, a timeless signature, and relaunching as RM in 2006. Along the way, he developed a female following – famous and obscure – that was delighted to have a designer unafraid of curves, be they tiny or supersized. Roland Mouret dresses – and now separates and bridal – work with your shape and your foundation garments. They give, as he says, “good bum.”
To these he has added eyewear; shoes; handbags; accessories; a fragrance, Une Amourette; a store and atelier in London’s tony Mayfair section; and a book, appropriately titled “Roland Mouret: Provoke Attract Seduce” (Rizzoli, 2018).
Yet, he remains a country boy, living and working in Suffolk; and, in his own words, an outsider, no matter how many celebrities he dresses. Albeit one who knows how to be invited in from the cold.