It seems unfortunate timing. With fashion trends currently taking a lead from the early 2000s, the label was well placed for a revival. It’s not a stretch to imagine Beckham and co rewearing their Galaxies on the red carpet today, not just in an effort to be sustainable, but for the same reasons they wore it the first time around: because it makes them look and feel so good.
“I have always wanted to guarantee that you can’t take a bad picture in my clothes,” Mouret told The Telegraph back in 2018. “But you have to also understand your body from 360 degrees and what you do and don’t like about yourself. As soon as you know that, you can find a favourite designer. You decide that this person’s work stands for the same things that you do and makes you feel confident.”
No wonder, then, that he had a loyal clientele – in the age of social media, when every person you encounter has a high-spec camera at the ready in their phone, a man with that kind of talent should surely remain in high demand. On the front row at his shows you would see the same women return year after year, faithfully clad in his hyper-figure-flattering creations.
As a business, though, the Roland Mouret journey has been a rocky one. Just two months after the Galaxy dress launched, Mouret split from his financial backers, Sharai and André Meyers, citing ‘managerial differences’. He took a two-year hiatus (during which he designed a line of dresses for Gap), before launching a new fashion label, RM by Roland Mouret, backed by Simon Fuller, the Spice Girls manager and financial muscle behind Victoria Beckham’s namesake fashion label. Indeed, when Beckham first launched her critically acclaimed collection of Galaxy-esque dresses in 2008, it was rumoured that Mouret was ‘ghost-designing’ the collection behind the scenes, although he claims to have only helped her recruit a pattern-cutter.