Roland Mouret, Loved By Meghan Markle And Victoria Beckham, Has Gone Into Administration

Luxury fashion house Roland Mouret has gone into administration, it has been announced.

The brand was beloved by high-profile fans including Meghan Markle, Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet and Dita von Teese. Introduced in 2005, his nip-tuck Galaxy dress – a structured design that created a bombshell, hourglass silhouette on anyone who wore it – remains one of his most iconic, best loved designs. Testament to its popularity, it is still available today.

But it wasn’t just A-listers who were obsessed with Mouret’s work, he has consistently been one of the few designers to accommodate – and appreciate – ‘real’ women’s bodies of all shapes and sizes. A master of shape, silhouette and structure, there is an innate generosity to his designs, a modern outlook coupled with an appreciation for old school glamour.

‘It’s just you being professional enough to understand that the body changes. Someone might be a bigger size but flat-chested and someone else might be really small but with big breasts,’ he toldGraziain 2017, crediting meeting his actual customers with giving him a better understanding of how women want and need to dress. ‘The day I understood the difference between a woman and a model – that a woman wears a bra in the day and the model doesn’t because she’s 16 and we only employ her for a few minutes on the catwalk – made a big difference.’

The son of a butcher, Mouret was born in Lourdes in 1961. Having spent a decade in Paris, he decamped to London and in 1998 founded put his instinctive draping to effect by founding his eponymous brand. When he split from backers in 2005, Mouret lost the rights to his name, something he has said he found heartbreaking. In 2006, he joined forces with Simon Fuller’s XIX Entertainment, designing under RM by Roland Mouret before he bought back the rights to his own name in 2010. In 2011, he opened a flagship store in Carlos Place, Mayfair. He remains one of the industry’s most loved figures.

Mouret’s label is the latest casualty in a brutally harsh period for retail that has affected brands from high-end to high street. Ralph & Russo – the haute couture house that made Meghan Markle’s engagement pictures gown – collapsed this summer; Phillip Green’s Arcadia went into administration a year ago.

For the women who wear Roland Mouret, the news that the label is closing will be sad. But what it won’t be the end for is the clothes, which they will continue to love and turn to when they want to feel like their best selves. As for Mouret? He has faced adversity before, no doubt this isn’t the end of his time in fashion.