Rochas (Q7183)
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Rochas is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Rochas |
Rochas is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
In sifting through the archives at Rochas, Alessandro Vigilante came across photos of founder Marcel Rochas enjoying downtime at the beach. In stark contrast to today, the house’s founder dressed like a dandy even in OOO mode.Vigilante has been at Rochas for a year now, and with this presentation—a beachside cabana complete with sand, staged at the Théâtre de Châtelet—he seemed to be settling in a little more. Where prior outings channeled starlets of the silver screen lounging in a boudoir, here he nudged them into the real world, and in doing so gave the Rochas client a bit more to hang her hat on.Looking tan and hale himself, the designer described this collection as an homage to sea and sun. “A mid-century wardrobe with boyish tailoring and casual craft,” as he put it in the collection notes. During a walk-through, he also cited a print ad from 1949: A dark silhouette appears with a hat, bag, shoes, and jewelry, yet it’s not immediately clear what that woman is wearing.Vigilante has a few ideas to fill in the blanks: his mood board included images by Patrick Demarchelier as well as family photos of Marcel’s second wife, the Italian artist Rina Rosselli, in her bathing costume; and Marcel, ever in a suit, surrounded by family and friends.Shell shapes and on-point organic textures fleshed out the seaside theme. Borrowing directly from the founder's sartorial lexicon, Vigilante described a safari jacket as “beach wear that’s a bit boyish” yet he also managed to work in lightness and flou he qualified as “a little messy and easy to wear.” A few tulle tops picked up on the beach ball motif interspersed with anRlogo. Shorts in sandcastle brocade gave the theme a literal spin, while cloud-like prints evoked nostalgia, and a sponge-based material, shown here in Look 17, brought both texture and sustainability to the mix.Vigilante described the Rochas woman as “a driven dreamer, but with feet on the ground.” This collection showed tentative progress: A coastal palette of coconut, yellow, navy and turquoise will be universally flattering, but as the house rolls into its 100th anniversary celebration next year—amazingly, Marcel was only 23 when he set up shop—it will need to ease up a bit on the past and focus on its future. No logo, however sleek, can prove a house’s relevance for the 21st century.
26 September 2024
Alessandro Vigilante is settling in at Rochas, honing shapes and playing with color. In a way, gaming out a look is not so different from designing a home, he noted during a preview. One of the original Swans, Gloria Vanderbilt, kept company with Babe Paley on the mood board, along with images of their homes in Paris and Jamaica. A guiding inspiration was Vanderbilt’s observation about personal style: “Decoration is autobiography.”Vigilante said he started by looking at some period jewelry befitting that kind of woman, picking up on a shell jewelry piece with turquoise and coral by Verdura and turning it into a chambray top with tie shoulders and coral tweed trousers, for example. Elsewhere, sorbet hues—daffodil, lavender, mint—served to break up classic black and white. “A mix of colors is really important because it reflects the Rochas woman,” Vigilante said, adding that he wanted to steer away from trends in favor of taking cues from how Marcel Rochas approached color and fabric.“Today we need more attention on details and self-expression in a gentle, sophisticated and feminine way,” he stated. The Rochas version of relaxed dressing leaves no room for hoodies, sneakers or naked dressing.But it might mean doing custom fabrics that riff on vintage rosebud wallpaper, here on a pants or skirt ensemble with shoes to match. Taken separately, some pieces looked like solid building blocks, among them a flowing pair of black trousers, a periwinkle shirred bomber, a ladylike cardigan with froissé trim, a voluminous navy cotton bomber, shown here with a leather kimono belt. Coats with shirred details at the waist or cuffs neatly captured a micro-trend for next spring. A couple of evening dresses with flowing trumpet sleeves looked like possible photo-op contenders. Other pieces, for example a white and lilac striped jacquard shirt cut so that the sleeves could also be worn as a belt, felt contrary to the ease the designer said he was looking to achieve.Vigilante is being very deliberate and careful about mining whatever he can in the Rochas archives: a long dress in lace jacquard was based on one produced about 100 years ago, now rendered in technical fabric. That may be a new twist on the founder’s sensibility and taste, but what the house needs most now is a recognizable signature—beyond any logo—that today’s consumer can connect with immediately. Genuinely wearable shoes would be nice, too.
24 June 2024
Rochas is gunning for a comeback under the creative direction of Alessandro Vigilante. There’s a lot of work to do here—after all, Rochas is best known for fragrances these days—so logically enough the designer started back at square one, draping a salon in the Hôtel d’Évreux in hibiscus pink and rustling up some Marcel Rochas signatures like squared jacket necklines, a peplum or an hourglass jacket to jog the fashion world's memory. Asked to describe what Rochas should mean today, Vigilante replied “elegance, simplicity and youth,” and he piled on a lot of fantasy while he was at it, but mercifully stopped short of naked dressing.The point of departure was a 1939 photograph by Carlo Mollino entitled “Fairytales for Adults,” which shows a model stepping out of a wardrobe in a satin gown. Behind her, one divines a closet filled not just with clothes, but also with curios. Harking back to those times, Vigilante picked out French lace with a scalloped Art Deco motif, fashioning it into little slip dresses in champagne beige or black adorned with lacy ribbons whose tails were left to flutter as the wearer moved (those lace stockings were actually an archival re-creation). Backstage, the moodboard cited the indomitable Diana Vreeland, who proclaimed “the eye has to travel.” And so it did here, alighting on variously clever and improbable ideas. In addition to those slip dresses, several looks made a case for dressed-down fancy, for example in margarita green cargo pants cut in duchesse satin, or a two-tiered duchesse skirt in petrol blue paired with a lighter blue wool cardigan. Many of the fabrics, such as a chocolate brocade, technical, froissé or dévoré velvet, and emerald satin, were lush. Most accessories and some of the clothes—a blanket wrap, a skirt sewn with curlicued silver ribbons—hinted at a sly wit and a taste for surrealism. But the Rochas woman has been all over the map of late and Vigilante comes backed by big ambitions. Let’s see what materializes in that closet whenever she decides to step out of the boudoir.
28 February 2024
He may be just 26, but Charles de Vilmorin has a charming, old-world air about him. At a time of the great fashion mash-up, he continues to speak of outfits as being for day or evening, exactly the way Marcel Rochas would have done in his heyday, 70-odd years ago.Backstage just moments before a presentation in a hewn-out building on the rue François 1er, the designer described his fall collection as “sort of a story about a woman who loves going out, partying, and who through her clothes needs to preserve that energy and hold onto memories of a really festive atmosphere.” Sort of the way one might throw a man’s wool overcoat over a tulle gown to meander back home through the streets of Paris at sunrise. In the City of Light, there’s no such thing as the walk of shame.Framed as a “sentimental journey through the ’50s,” the collection emphasized high contrast and showed De Vilmorin’s potential as a colorist. Lingerie references refiltered from the archives included the improbable pairing of a yellow-toned, glossy python-print leather bustier and a lush brocade in Wedgwood blue and silver. A Deco-leaning jacquard of De Vilmorin’s own design riffed onLes Triplettes de Belleville, “the energy of101 Dalmatians,” and his own pup, Terreur. A coat in that jacquard was paired with a woven gold Lurex gown. A skirt in the same material was shown with a navy zippered rib-knit cardigan. The designer clearly has a sense of occasionwear—a raspberry bustier dress had an air of Old Hollywood sophistication—but overall this short presentation conveyed a sense that De Vilmorin is doing what he can with limited resources. Given a bit more latitude, he could probably really start going places.
5 March 2023
About 20 years ago, two icons of French cinema, Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Frot, appeared in a debut feature film by director Alexandra Leclère called “Les Soeurs Fachées” (it was distributed as “Me and My Sister” in English). That classic country mouse versus city mouse dramedy about sisterhood, style, and strife well illustrates the Rochas woman, designer Charles de Vilmorin said during a recent Zoom interview.“I wanted to recount her through that clash of two worlds, as a sophisticated woman who has a touch of whimsy, transcribed through volume and unexpected texture or color,” he said. As in the film, he wanted a sartorial confrontation that was “violent.” For pre-fall, his Rochas silhouettes are long and lean, but offset with out-of-character touches, for example a houndstooth coat has a “craftsy” texture and is shown here with high-gloss red stilettos. A sophisticated skirt in tiny wool check reprises the classic pencil shape, but with an explosion of very feminine ruffles that the designer described as moving “like fins moving through water.” It’s a strong piece, here paired with a body-con turtleneck in blazing orange. For the bold, a bustier number black and marigold brocade might go with low boots in tonal python.Vilmorin’s job at Rochas is to respect a certain heritage while also making the house feel new. In the past, he’s shown a tendency to over-maximalize. With this, his seventh collection, he manages to show his tailoring chops, tone things down a bit, and still jazz things up with hot color—yellow, orange, red—and textures. If not everything convinces, there are several pieces here—suiting in white brocade, a swing coat in quilted black vinyl-laminated wool, or a brocade bomber—that speak clearly to both sides of the Rochas equation.
24 January 2023
Charles de Vilmorin is a victim of poor recruitment. At the beginning of last year, at just 24, he was made creative director of Rochas, a sort of ghost ship of a house that is owned by Interparfums and is more about the fragrance than fashion. Alessandro Dell’Acqua had been there for six years before, and while his collections never set the world on fire, they were professional and proficient and befitting of the faded heritage of Marcel Rochas.After several seasons of polite consideration, it’s now fair to say that, while de Vilmorin is a talented and particular artist, he is not as yet the fashion designer a house such as Rochas demands. This collection was naive and ill-considered—sometimes apparently barely considered. The goldfish bowl heels were an old joke. The opaque pannier dresses hung like bags of oranges at the hips of the poorly styled models. De Vilmorin is a ruffle-ologist, and that’s fine—but there are so many more accomplished specialists out there, from Molly Goddard to Dries Van Noten. There was nothing here to want.Was there an upside? Well, de Vilmorin really is a graphic artist of distinction, and when the foliage or big cat patterns he’d sketched were shown, there were slight glimmers of hope—the faintest whiff of identity. But this collection felt, to quote the press release, “experimental and impossibly light.” It seems almost cruel to lay the weight of the house of Rochas upon the shoulders of a young man who, perfectly understandably, lacks the training and savoir faire to carry it. As mentioned at the top, no blame lies with de Vilmorin himself. Whomever recruited him should also consider their position.
29 September 2022
Charles de Vilmorin is feeling more at home at Rochas. For resort, he used currents from the winter collection to move the house forward, offering up “a very aquatic, colorful universe” while also evoking ideas about the love story between the house’s founder, Marcel Rochas, and his wife, Hélène, a proto-influencer who took over the house upon her husband’s death in 1955. “She may have been rather classic in appearance, but we found pictures of hers that were completely brazen. I recognize some of my friends in her,” he said during a Zoom conversation from Milan.De Vilmorin loves “crazy decadence” and extremes, whether in fashion, music, or makeup. A vintage ad campaign for a now-discontinued Rochas perfume—an 1980s-era image of a model emerging from the water in a body-con dress—also provided inspiration. “I wanted to bring out the same feeling of fun, but in a way that’s more of-the-moment,” the designer said.Rainbow stripes in primary colors fan out over an organza dress, for example, or cascade down an ethereal long, pleated skirt. A sky-and-sea mood comes with a print that owes a debt to Picasso, appearing on crepe suiting, jacquard, and fil coupé, perhaps paired with fully sequined thigh-highs informed by craggy undersea formations. (Speaking of which, such is the designer’s love for a thigh-high that he transposed its lines into the cut of mid-rise beige trousers.)Elsewhere, he rocked out on dramatic volumes by revisiting the power shoulder or giving a short dress enormous bell sleeves, just one of a number of pieces cut in the spirit of traditional Japanese clothing. Impractical-looking as some pieces may look, Though some of it may look impractical, the collection showed a taste for risk-taking—uncommon currency at heritage houses of this vintage. We’ll be watching what happens next.
30 June 2022
“She’s an intellectual. She’s an artist,” mused Charles de Vilmorin of the “new Rochas woman” to whose fancy he aspired in this collection. “She has a lot of culture and I wanted to work with very sophisticated and more classic silhouettes,” he added.After last season’s first show collection—a metaphorical suitcase overpacked with not enough to wear—this second one was focused more pragmatically on presenting a categorical cross section of stuff you could imagine this abstract intellectual artist getting into. The vibe was well-off Goth meets monochromatic New Romantic. When you looked beyond the multitude of styling- and accessory-imposed grandes gestes—Cruella talon nails, wrapped pigtails, roughly knotted metal arm and wrist jewelry, maximalist millinery—there were less attention-seeking but possibly more attention-meriting pieces to consider.A series of dresses whose full, almost floating skirts were suspended below narrow waisted full shouldered bodies represented a consistent silhouette. There were a couple of handsome hammered silk Le Smokings: one single-breasted in bronze, one double-breasted in black and one single-breasted in black jacquard. The shoe team did well via multicolor patchwork leather boots and studded-strap boots.Sandwiched between the monochromatic opening and closing spells was a colorful center section that returned to the lamé plissé of last season in skirts and shirts. There was a collapsed vector print that spoke to the patched boots. Shirts (once worn over a super-louche printed patterned velvet pant) and dresses in a botanical print or plain featured elongated sleeves longer on the right than left that were enjoyably silly. Another last season redux were the pierrot collars, some in cutaway sections, that you could argue are part of de Vilmorin’s developing vocabulary at Rochas. What’s not yet evident, however, is whether there is a question that this designer is answering by shaping his Rochas vocabulary.
2 March 2022
After an eccentric runway debut for spring, the young designer Charles de Vilmorin approached his Rochas pre-fall collection thinking more about wearability. The clothes were more classically inclined, though sweetened with his natural inclination toward whimsy.On a Zoom call, he said he looked at the heritage of the house along with photos of its founder, Marcel Rochas, and his wife, Hélène. One of Marcel’s jackets became a prototype for the delicately belted white style with rounded sleeves here, and a famous image of Hélène with a taxidermy bird perched on the bodice of her dress—so famous that Olivier Theyskens used it when he was at Rochas 16 years ago—informed the jacquard motif on a pair of cropped trousers. Another jacquard, which De Vilmorin applied to jackets and coats, lifted from Sonia Delaunay’sAlphabet—Rfor Rochas. “I love this artist,” he said. “I’m inspired by her direct message.” Exaggerated Pierrot collars were another one of his talking points, and the collection also had an outdoorsy streak that came through in walking shorts and riding boots.There was quite a bit going on, and De Vilmorin’s disparate ideas didn’t really cohere into a clear message, but he’s learning as he goes.
20 January 2022
Charles de Vilmorin is the new man at Rochas. He’s 24 and a recent graduate of the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne who made a splash in last year’s summertime lockdowns with a group of lively patchwork puffers and painted leggings. In short order he was invited to be a guest designer on the couture schedule and given the creative director job at Rochas that had been vacated by the Italian veteran Alessandro Dell’Acqua, who reliably synthesized popular trends and knows his way around a sellable dress.Perhaps hinting at the trial-by-fire aspect of his first runway show, De Vilmorin’s collection started with a group of looks whose palette and dark shimmer seemed informed by burning flames. There were short and long plissé lamé dresses in shades of red and black and a knee-length red-and-orange number whose arms were traced by a wide band of winglike ruffles. The second grouping was devoted to his drawings, which looked whimsical and distinctive on their gowns-as-canvases, though curiously quite close in both color and style to the printed pieces De Vilmorin did for his own couture debut in January. In the show’s third section, he explored deconstruction: slicing shirtdresses at the shoulders, using drawstrings to create asymmetric volumes in skirts, and twisting and draping a long piece of fabric into a bandeau.De Vilmorin had a crowd of heavy hitters in his audience, on the hunt for the next big thing after a year and a half of watching the Paris proceedings remotely. Asked how it feels to inherit a heritage label, he said, “It’s magical for me and a big, big challenge. I hope to tell a beautiful story.” Precisely what that story will be? That’s still taking shape.
29 September 2021