What women want

The Galaxy dress made designer Roland Mouret's a star. His secret? He knows what women really want, says Rachel Marie Walsh

ROLAND MOURET laughs as he recalls a recent visit to the capital. “The ladies in Dublin are crackers,” he says. I ask if he means they are good craic. “I mean they are like crackers, you know? They go off with a big bang and there are lots of surprises inside and a smell of gunpowder in the air!”

It is a cliché to say a male designer knows what women want but they do seem able to share anything with Mouret.

“I travel all over the world to meet customers and learn so much. They tell me about their diets, what they do in the gym and whether they are planning plastic surgery. If you want to master something, you need to have the humility to learn from the people you work for.”

The handsome ex-model describes himself as a great listener and is very discreet (I have twice been warned not to ask about celebrity clients). Two decades in London has not diluted his French accent. His success stems from an ability to bridge high fashion with everything a woman needs from a dress. Above all, he wants women who buy his clothes to feel sexy and confident.

“Women dress up to get undressed. Stretch underwear is great but no one wants to remove their Spank [sic] in front of a man. My dresses are for taking off.”

His most famous creation, the Galaxy, is a genius mix of secreted stretch and great tailoring. Puff sleeves flatter the upper arms. The broad-tailored shoulders, narrow hips and the long split in the pencil skirt allows for ease of movement and lengthens legs. The “power-mesh” stretch-lining gives that corseted look to the body. Boobs and bums are pushed up and out, waists nipped in and thighs and tummies smoothed.

“Every fabric I work with needs to have some stretch. It can show your body the way you want it to be seen and it feels really comfortable,” says Mouret.

Beyond the anatomical benefits, the Galaxy has broad social appeal. How many super-tight dresses are so appropriate for work and socialising? The silhouette suits a wide variety of ages and body types. The fabric is feminine but completely devoid of froufrou details.

“I would rather use an amazing fabric than use an embellishment to make a lower-quality fabric look like something it’s not,” says Mouret. You can also machine wash it, which would render most other designer dresses unwearable.

The Galaxy was a smash hit from the moment it hit the catwalk but the designer was no w¸nderkind. Mouret worked in several different areas of the fashion industry before launching his label in 1998. He grew up in Lourdes with his parents and two sisters. His father was a butcher who passed on his strong work ethic. Mouret’s first memory of manipulating fabric is folding his apron to hide blood from the customers.

In 1979 he moved to Paris to study fashion design. Jean Paul Gaultier spotted him in a club and convinced him to model. Mouret dropped out of college and worked variously as a model, stylist and magazine art director until 1991, when he moved to London to work on music videos. He co-founded a canteen-cum-art gallery in Soho and designed a clubwear line, People’s Corporation, which became a cult hit.

Mouret’s design style is organic and meticulous. There is no sketching. He drapes and redrapes fine fabrics around a dummy or a woman until he is satisfied, then he draws up the patterns. His designs are typically colourful but he does like them to have a dark side. Now he has designed a print to be featured on Sky boxes, taken from his Autumn 2014 collection and inspired by orchids — or another interpretation could be blood in the snow. This gory idea dovetails with his passion for vampire and horror movies.

The first Roland Mouret catwalk collection came together in his apartment and was secured by safety pins because he did not know how to make a buttonhole. Still, it captured the fash-pack’s attention enough for Sharai Meyer, a Scottish management consultant, to commission a dress. She wore it to accompany her boyfriend to a polo match and he proposed on the spot. The Meyers took it as a sign they should invest in the young Frenchman.

Andre Meyer became chairman of the brand in 2000 and Mouret was promised a share when the company turned a profit. He effectively signed his name and all of his patterns over to his backers. This deal was not public knowledge until October 2005, when he abruptly ended his relationship with the Meyers because of “strategic differences”. Mouret was suddenly jobless, just weeks after the Galaxy dress exploded onto the fashion radar.

He took a brief hiatus, which only heightened fashionistas’ desire for his clothes. With Victoria Beckham’s encouragement, he inked a 50-50 deal with entertainment mogul Simon Fuller in 2006 and began trading under the label RM by Roland Mouret. In 2010, he bought his name back.

“I wanted to get my name back in a natural way, and I didn’t want to get into any legal battles. Simon allowed me to develop a business while ensuring I always had enough space and resources to follow my intuition and establish the company,” Mouret said at the time.

While Mouret’s professional life was in transition, retailers and celebrities were going crazy for the Galaxy. This was one of those rare moments when women actually wanted to be seen in the same dress. For weeks, you could not open a magazine without seeing starlets showing off their curves in Mouret’s creation. Victoria Beckham, Heidi Klum, Scarlett Johansson and Dita von Teese all became friends and fans of the designer. Vogue pronounced the Galaxy “dress of the decade” and editor Anna Wintour said Mouret’s work “makes every type of woman, from Victoria Beckham to Nicole Kidman to Rachel Weisz, look better and more feminine than she ever has”.

Almost 15 years on, Mouret’s name is rarely heard without mention of the Galaxy. This does not faze the designer, who is happy to let his work be the star.

“I am really happy to be able to ‘hide’ behind my dresses... I also feel I provide a service and would much rather be remembered for that than my own celebrity.”

¦ See the limited edition Roland Mouret Sky+HD 2TB with built-in Wi-Fi from www.sky.com/designerboxes