Halle Berry, Beyoncé and Dita Von Teese in Roland Mouret Galaxy dresses. Composite: MediaPunch/Getty Images/WireImage View image in fullscreen Halle Berry, Beyoncé and Dita Von Teese in Roland Mouret Galaxy dresses. Composite: MediaPunch/Getty Images/WireImage Fashion ‘I wanted to create the female version of a man’s suit’: how Roland Mouret’s Galaxy dress took over the world One the most famous dresses of this century, it was worn by royalty and A-list celebrities in the noughties. Its latest fans are Maga women. Here, the designer, and former mentor to Victoria Beckham, reveals the story behind it
Prefer the Guardian on Google T he story of one of the most photographed and ripped-off dresses of the last 50 years came together with a simple zip. It was 1998; the designer Roland Mouret had shown his first collection at London fashion week and was looking for a way to produce good clothes at speed. He connected with a small British atelier and it was there that some old-school industry wisdom would alter his course: he learned that a longer seam doesn’t actually cost any more than a shorter one.
Despite his brilliantly instinctive approach to design, it was like cracking a code – and steered him towards the dress that would make his name. “My brain was buzzing!” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it before – if you extend a top by 50cm, it becomes a whole outfit. You just need accessories. Focusing on dresses gives you a signature piece at the right price.”
The hyper-bodycon Galaxy dress, with its industrial zip on the back, was born, embedding itself in the public consciousness via the backs of Beyoncé, Halle Berry and Victoria Beckham . Creating a singular silhouette, it helped Mouret define the look of the late 90s and early 2000s in London as much as John Galliano or Alexander McQueen did a few years before him.
View image in fullscreen Naomi Watts in the Galaxy dress in 2005. Photograph: James Devaney/WireImage “I really earned my two lines in the fashion bible,” says Mouret, whose new autobiography, I Am Roland Mouret – The Butcher’s Boy Who Dressed the World, documents the era. “It had what we call in French ‘the lunch neckline’, with the sharpness of a table, and a waistline cinched in like that of an iconic 1950s actress, but comfortable and not too girlie. It had masculinity.”
While Elizabeth Hurley culturally owned that Versace safety pin dress after wearing it on the red carpet in 1994, leaving its second life solely to museums, the Galaxy reappeared in Mouret’s collections “in the colour and fabric of the season” for years – and continued to be seen on a who’s who of Hollywood, from Scarlett Johansson to Naomi Watts.
“I always saw the people I was dressing from the back,” he says now over a video call from his home in London. “I wanted to position myself behind them so I could see their point of view. The zip was part of that – it was at the back of the dress. As soon as you see a face, your imagination stops and the real person is there.” It was a way of designing clothes that he would later impart as a mentor to Victoria Beckham; the Galaxy’s silhouette could be seen in her early collections.
In the book, which is a candid and moving account of his life in rural France, Paris and London, Mouret writes about sexual exploration as a teenager. It would become part of the R&D for the Galaxy: “I had sex with women but knew I wasn’t straight,” he says. “It was a collaboration. I wasn’t trying to prove my masculinity, it was…