Rochas Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear: Between the Bar and the Boudoir
For his fall 2024 Rochas presentation, the brand’s new creative director of ready-to-wear, Alessandro Vigilante, had about a dozen models milling — or lounging — around a square salon, the walls and furniture all cloaked in bright pink fabric.
You couldn’t tell if it was a cocktail party, or a boudoir, the gleaming satins and coiling silver fringe suggesting the former, and the bathrobe-easy jackets and plush materials evoking the latter.
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Vigilante seems agnostic to such distinctions, working satin duvets into a clutch coat and a snappy bomber jacket, or teaming a snug cardigan with a tiered, trumpet-shaped evening skirt.
His first effort for the heritage brand, founded in 1925 by Marcel Rochas, suggests a love of color, and the signposts of femininity Rochas himself plied: lace, peplums and screen-siren glamour among them.
“It’s a first step,” said Vigilante, a soft-spoken designer prone to storing stickpins in his trouser pleats or sweater, always ready for a fitting.
“Everyday fantasy,” he said of his approach, and that’s as good a description as any for hydrangea-like embroideries on pointy pumps, a raincoat made with a gleaming, technical velvet or cargo pants done up in a natty menswear tweed.
Vigilante is the latest second-in-command talent to emerge from the shadows recently and land a plum design post. Previously he worked in the studio of such brands as The Attico, Dolce & Gabbana, Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini and Gucci, and he hopes to stage a runway show come September.
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Launch Gallery: Rochas Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear Collection
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