September 21, 2012
Roland Mouret discusses his new role as creative director of footwear brand Robert Clergerie with Rebecca Cope at Harpers Bazaar.
Roland Mouret is known for making dresses that make women feel confident, powerful, and above all, sexy, and now he’s set to do the same thing with high heels as the new creative director of French footwear brand Robert Clergerie. Inspired by films, his first footwear collection for the brand includes everything from over-the-knee, stretch-fit boots, to platform heeled Mary-Janes, in a palette of blacks, browns and metallics.
“I was inspired by periods of film, rather than specific films,” he explained when we caught up with the designer at the launch of his collection in Selfridges. “That period of 1969 student revolution in Paris, and Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint Laurent in Belle Du Jour, and then at the same time the London Biba attitude of the Sixties and Seventies,
with people like Twiggy.”
And the women he’d most like to see wearing his designs?
“I’m very happy that two quite different women, Alexa Chung and Florence Welch, have worn them,” he confided. “They represent the character of the collection, both the Sixties boyish, revolutionary side and the really feminine eccentric, Seventies side. Women who are really enjoying being women. ”
This isn’t the first time Mouret has dappled in shoe design – he started off at Robert Clergerie at the beginning of his career 25 years ago. So was this the homecoming he expected?
“It’s a weird feeling, because it’s like coming back home. You realise what you learnt when you were a young person – everything Robert showed me in my Twenties, about minimalism, structure, architecture – these things form your own identity as a designer without you even realising it.”
“You go back, and it’s an amazing honour – and it’s natural, because everything falls into place.”
Roland Mouret’s first collection for Robert Clergerie is available in the Selfridges Designer Shoe Galleries on Oxford Street now.
Issued by Roland Mouret