Rochas Enters a New Era

When he signed the contract to take over Rochas, Alessandro Vigilante faced quite the challenge. It’s a historic French fashion house, but one that’s been through a lot of different eras, and experienced many stops and starts.

Marcel Rochas launched the brand in 1925. Over the course of his career, he championed a variety of innovative silhouettes (the mermaid gown, 3/4 coats, the Bird dress); he introduced fragrance in the ’40s (Femme for women, then Moustache for men), and that became the core business after his death, when Rochas stopped making clothes. Fast-forward to the 1990s, and then-parent company Wella decided to bring back apparel. Rochas received critical acclaim under Olivier Theyskens‘ creative direction in the 2000s, but Proctor & Gamble, which bought Wella in 2003, decided to shut it down again in 2006 — only to bring it back, again, in 2008. In the years since, Rochas has been led by Marco Zanini, Alessandro Dell’Aqua and, most recently, Charles de Vilmorin. (In 2015, the brand was acquired by Interparfums.)

All of this background is important to understand exactly what the challenge that Vigilante faces is. The Italian designer was announced as the new creative director in December. He’d been mostly a behind-the-scenes guy at Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Lorenzo Serafini, before launching his namesake label in 2021. Rochas presents a very unique problem to solve, though: Having gone through so many different hands, it can be hard for the customer to identify what makes Rochas, Rochas.

For his debut, Vigilante wanted to reestablish a connection to the founder, and remind audiences of where the brand’s story began. The chantilly lace nods to the original packaging of Femme; one lace pattern features an original Marcel Rochas floral design, another a feather motif, in reference to the designer’s famous Bird dress. In Vigilante’s hands, the fabric is a “second skin,” he told Fashionista at the Fall 2024 presentation on Wednesday in Paris.

“For me, clothes are nothing without the people that wear them,” Vigilante said. “I was a professional contemporary dancer, so, for me, the body, movement to see the clothes in movement are very important, because we have to move in real life. Clothes needs to make us more confident and to be more ourselves, to express our experiences through the looks that we choose.”

The tight collection also boasts a mustard-yellow-and-burgundy stripe pattern, which calls back to the original packaging of Moustache. “Marcel loved the stripe,” Vigilante explained. “Also, Wallis Simpson was his client, and he dressed [her in] these jackets with stripes in the bias. So, for me, the stripe is important for this new chapter. Everything starts from heritage.”

Going through the archives and seeing those Marcel Rochas originals allowed Vigilante to tap into something harder to articulate — “how he anticipated the desire of the woman and felt that the desire of woman,” he said. In this new role, Vigilante wants to speak to the woman “that would like to be free, to express herself freely,” and have her bring that energy to the clothing.

Keep scrolling to see every look from Rochas Fall 2024.

Rochas Fall 2024. Photo: Courtesy of Rochas