The Roland Mouret Galaxy dress was first shown in 2005 and immediately became a defining shape of its time. Partly, the dress was so successful because it was strict and yet curve-friendly, making it easy to look nice in. It had in it a tension and a contradiction. The cleverness of the tailoring, the 3D precision of the darts and seaming, always makes me think about the concave angles they use when designing stealth weaponry, except that in the case of the Mouret dress, obviously, the idea is not to be invisible, but the most spectacular creature in the room. ‘The dress is a tool,’ as Mouret himself has put it. ‘And a tool has to work.’

LRB 5 July 2012 | PDF Download