Evening Standard, UK 'june 24th, 2013'
Roland Mouret :
Certain Mrs Beckham. [Victoria] is not a designer like me but she had amazing potential — like Diane von Furstenberg or Estée Lauder
years later, you don’t recognise that person any more.”
He adds that he lacked the energy to fight for his name: “I had to protect the only thing that I consider to be mine: my hands, the way I drape. If my name wasn’t inside the clothes, though, the outside had to scream it.”
Mouret managed to bounce back, winning the financial backing of the music tycoon Simon Fuller, who once managed the Spice Girls. It was Fuller’s first foray into fashion. “His now-wife [Natalie Swanston, who was a Mouret client] and Victoria [Beckham] said: ‘you have to meet Roland, that guy can’t disappear.’ For him, something about fashion and popular culture came together.” Initially the firm operated as RM but Mouret won back the rights to his name in 2010.
They own half the company each, with Fuller giving Mouret free rein. The business is thriving — “we are in profit and we are growing” — and recently moved into the lucrative world of handbags.
This relationship with Fuller sparked rumours that Mouret was behind Victoria Beckham’s eponymous womenswear label as the former Spice Girl remains Fuller’s client. Mouret, friends with Beckham and clearly tired of hearing this suggestion, sighs.
“Can she call me a mentor? Yes. I gave her some advice, some names, some people and allowed her to call me whenever she wants. That’s all.”
They met when she was first considering launching her line: “She had an amazing potential that certain women have — like Diane von Furstenberg or Estée Lauder. Some women are businesswomen by the fact that people love and hate them at the same time. She is the most photographed woman, so why should she be photographed in other people’s clothes if she can be photographed in her own?”
He sees Beckham’s success as part of a wider trend. “It was time for the name and product to come together. She is not a designer like me but she has something I don’t have: that unique sense of wearing what she is doing, and that picture will go around the world, and sell it.”
I ask if this change in the industry irks him as a non-celebrity designer. “No. Fashion is a sign of the way we are living. As designers, we used celebrities by dressing them in our clothes. The next step is the hybrid of that. Designers like me are a bit old-fashioned. [Beckham] is like Lady Gaga — she has one of the strongest powers in social media. Kanye West is the same. The person on the cover of Vogue is now driven by the number of Twitter followers she has — not how beautiful or clever she is.”
Mouret didn’t take the traditional path into fashion himself — there’s no mention of Central St Martins, or even a degree from any other fashion college — on his CV. The son of a Lourdes butcher, he made his first garment aged eight when his grandmother taught him to make a top with a scarf: “I loved the transformation, the magic of it.”
