English designer Roland Mouret always pours his heart out in his press notes, making for a sincere experience during a fashion week that is as a whole anything but. 'It took me over fifty years to get here today, this morning, in this abandoned bank in Paris,' he wrote for his Winter collection. 'And what have I learnt? Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.' This season, he said, was not about presenting a look or an outfit but rather about advancing his skills as a designer. As such, he took his signature vacuum-sucked, three-quarter length dress silhouette and began cutting away from it piece by piece, collaging it back together with a mixture of materials. Mouret employed snake skin, leather, sheer netting and wools, cutting and pasting them into new vertical stripes or panels across the bodies of dresses and skirts that were yanked left of centre. There was a slight tribal quality to his patterns this season, as he introduced graphic, feathered arrow formations in woven black and white panels, or real feather appliqués across the fronts of dresses. The techniques the designer explored were all of top calibre this season, including the thick wool or printed jersey ribbons of fringe that fell to the floor like hula skirts. But when piled all together, including the leather collars that looked like scrolls of paper, at times his collaging took on a cumbersome effect. Mouret's work is lovely; it just needs a little more room to breathe so that he can truly fly.
Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans
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