Roland Mouret on Fashion & Technology

Technology tends to be double-edged sword; for every advantage, there's a disadvantage. For instance Net-a-porter's a great platform for you because you're a young brand and it allows you to by-pass traditional distribution of your goods and get it into the hands of the customer directly. On the other hand, in a matter of hours of you're sending new looks down the runway and the pictures travel around the world. So, how as a designer do you protect your designs? How do you protect your hard work, your labor from the seedier side of technology which allows people to reproduce your work?


Roland Mouret:

I think the great thing about it is it push you to think outside of the box. I know what the problem of copying and information traveling even before the event happened. What I'm interested now in my way to work is to arrive to a certain point to deliver the collection straight away after the show, because I think we're not in a time any more where you want to wait six months for a collection arrive. You see it online, you want it now. Especially with the kind of things happening around us; there is no more season. That mean it's about the product and it's about an emotion you have with that product. My work at the moment is to deliver closer to my show. The next show I'm going to present in October, end of September/beginning of October. We will starting to deliver it in November, in stores. It's not magic, it's just a way to organize yourself and to sell it in advance, and to be ready there. And the show has to be closer to the delivery and like that it can't be copied.



This is an excerpt from a talk given by Natalie Massenet and Roland Mouret at the Apple store in London on fashion and technology. You can download the entire podcast on iTunes.