London got its very first taste of the resort phenomenon on Thursday morning as Roland Mouret presented an intimate catwalk show of mid-season clothes in his townhouse-cum-HQ-cum-shop in Mayfair. While other designers have chosen to present their pre-collections at strategic international points on the retail map – Chanel in Dubai, Céline in Beijing and Louis Vuitton in Monaco – Mouret became the first designer to show his commercial collection in London to a small group of editors and buyers, and he hopes others will follow suit in the coming seasons. He said he hoped to "open the doors for great British designer collections to be showcased here".
Resort, cruise or pre-collection (all are essentially the same thing, a collection between the main autumn/winter and spring/summer shows) are becoming increasingly important in the fashion calendarand are now beginning to compete with the main shows for attention and industry standing.
Naturally the clothes shown by Mouret emitted the body-conscious, restrained glamour that we expect from the Mouret house. This time there was, in the words of the designer, a "south of France-slash-London" flavour to the collection, with folded scarfdetails at waistbands, cropped tops and capri pants reprised in fluoro peach and aqua; zips and structure realism meets Riviera optimism. The standout piece was a monochrome jumpsuit with Mouret's trademark bandage structure providing the back view. They were clothes which you can imagine hanging in the plush carpeted changing rooms of the Mayfair store, which is, of course, exactly the point; these clothes will account for 70 per cent of Mouret's retail sales and represent the commercial point of view of the brand.
It isn't really the trends that matter here (although they will become actual street style if your street is Bond Street, you favour a sleek silhouette, and your credit card is platinum) it's more the fact that showing a resort or cruise collection on a catwalk has become a trend in itself, a trend that London is now part of.
It isn't a move that all designers are enamoured with. Tom Ford told earlier this week that cruise catwalk shows missed the point. "The fact that cruise is now shown with these giant productions means it's no longer what it was supposed to be, which was clothes that were maybe not strong enough to show but were your real bread and butter; the clothes that women wanted to wear. But now that they're being shown, they'll have to be amped up, and women won't want to wear them any more," he said.
However Mouret's resort show, with its downplayed salon-like atmosphere, was without pretension. He admitted that pre-collections are "what makes my company exist because they are relevant in my customers' wardrobes". The designer also pointed out that for him this trend within the industry of spotlighting resort is reminiscent of the moment when Yves Saint Laurent moved from showing only couture to showing ready to wear as well in the 1960s. "It's that same transition. The ready to wear shows are more the image of the designer in terms of craft and mentality and the pre-collections are what we are living with."
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