Marni announced Meryll Rogge as its new creative director today. “I’m truly honored to join Marni—a house I’ve long admired for its independent spirit,” the designer said in the news release. “To take on a role defined by such visionary creative directors is both humbling and inspiring.”
Rogge is a Belgian designer who developed a sense of surprise and novelty when working side-by side with Marc Jacobs, and honed her color sense and appreciation for prints when she joined Dries Van Noten as head of womenswear. Since launching her namesake line in 2019, Rogge has become recognized for her off-kilter takes on the slip dress and her fantastic knits, including beaded cardigans for men and women. Celebs fell hard for her sassy boxer bloomers, but customers keep coming back for generously cut khakis with an elastic waist, deconstructed shirting, and fashionable interpretations of sporty separates.
With Rogge’s appointment, Marni is once more woman-led. Consuelo Gastiglioni launched the brand in 1994 as a complement to her husband Gianni Castiglioni’s fur business. (His sister’s nickname was borrowed for the company moniker.) After coming up with ways to take the stoginess out of fur, she needed something to wear under them, and so clothes followed. “The process of creating a collection is very instinctual…I follow what I like,” Castiglioni told Vogue in 2013. That ability to make things feel personal and easy is a point of connection between the founder and Rogge.
A point of distinction is how Rogge, educated at the Royal Academy of Art, carries forward the Belgian heritage of deconstruction with a light touch. While a lot of thought goes into her patternmaking, the results are not coolly conceptually, but engaging and enticing.
In advance of Rogge’s Marni debut, here’s everything you need to know about the designer.
Timeline
1984
Born and raised in Flemish Ghent where she dreamed of becoming an illustrator and working for Disney. Caught sketching dresses in her Ancient Greek class, the professor suggested Rogge become a designer.
2002 - 2004
Read law at Université Notre Dame de la Paix, Namur. “My parents were not so hot on me studying fashion…and so we made a pact where I was going to study the bachelor of law, which luckily at the time was only two years, and then I could do whatever I wanted.”
2004
After graduating, applied to the Royal Academy of Arts. Rogge wasn’t admitted and did a foundation year in Antwerp.
2005 - 2008
Enrolls in the bachelor’s program at the Royal Academy. “My teacher was Walter Van Beirendonck—he’s totally on a different planet than Martin [Margiela], or Dries [Van Noten], but they all were in the same class in the same school,” Rogge later noted. “I’ve never felt like there was this boundary: ‘Oh, you’re a Belgian, you’re Northern; oh, you should be doing gray melange stuff only, or black.’”
2008 - 2014
Lands summer internship with Marc Jacobs. “This was my biggest dream. The fact that this came true I still think is insane, actually.” Rogge planned to return to the Academy for her Master’s but she was hired full-time two months before the 2008 crash. “At Marc you learn everything about fabrics: how fabric falls, how to treat it, the finishings, how you do fittings, what to pay attention to, all the detailing…. Marc would do the styling and the casting separately, so for me, [working with Marc] was really garment focused, collection focused, fabric focused, working with pattern makers, how you communicate, really learning all that. And it was vast because of course he changes the collection from one season to another 180 degrees, or 360. There was never a reference or fabric that we could have the same. It was always new. Everything new, every color knew. So it kept things really challenging, but interesting because you cannot rely on the past.”
2014 - 2018
Joins Dries Van Noten It “felt like an amazing opportunity because I was going to be head of women’s, so it was a step up. I stayed there for four years. It was really wonderful, I worked with him really hand-in-hand all the time. We were attached at the hip; we were doing fabric allocations at 7 in the morning when the office was quiet at his desk with a view of the harbor and the boats, which was cool. [Working with Dries] was the total opposite of working with Marc. Dries was independent at the time, so that changes a lot of perspectives, you compromise more, you think about the final client, you think about wearability way more. Those are things that I really learned from him. Also the collection was way bigger. With Dries we also were involved in casting, styling, and the show concept, so that expanded a little bit, my vision more.”
2019
Rogge takes a sort of gap year. “I was 34 and I was like, at 35 it’s now or never. I didn’t quit; I gently said, ‘Listen, I really want to do something else.’ And also I wanted to have a family. Clement, my now husband, and I just met. And it was clear that we were going to get along really well and we also both wanted to have children.”
“The idea to start a collection was already there before the Academy…. I took a year off to really think it through. Also I traveled a little bit. [I also started consulting.] I would go to Marc in New York to work on the collection, and also work with Dries. With Dries, everything happens at the beginning; and then with Marc, everything happens at the end. So this was kind of aligned and they were all okay with it. So I did this two seasons in a row.
After I left, Dries had sold to Puig and they wanted to develop the fragrance and beauty line. Dries says, ‘Listen, we’re also working on another project, so do you want to do some consulting for that?’ That seemed really exciting because I love working on stuff other than clothes. I think it really speaks to me in a way. We’re still collaborating on this six, seven years after. So this has been a wonderful new world opening up.”
Rogge establishes her headquarters in a white stone house with a red tiled roof located in a field in the small town of Deinze.
2020
Meryll Rogge launches for fall 2020. “I started the brand in March, 2020. We launched in Paris two weeks before COVID, so that was fun. We had 35 retailers that ordered; all the factories were closed, but we managed to renegotiate the delivery window.
With Meryll Rogge we always seek to inspire by the visual language, the casting, the way we think about the environment of the show or what we do after. But more specifically, it’s of course a lot of attention to materials, textures, and also pushing our limits a little bit of what we do with print…. There are historical elements, but there are also vintage elements.”
The designer has her first viral moment, courtesy of Nordstrom. Rogge designed “a glove that was also a boa [that] was made of bright red duchess silk. Unfortunately, the shot of the model was a little bit strange; she was posing in a blue dress with two red arms. They didn’t show the back, and people started commenting that she looked like a lobster, and it went completely viral, and they had to stop the comment section. But I laughed so hard at all the comments, I thought it was fantastic. I mean, that’s what you want. You want people to react to your stuff, and to have this from season one was amazing.”
2021
March: Rogge, speaking of her fall collection, says there was “an accent on luxury,” via the materials used, and an “aspect of vintage reference. I’m kind of leaning on classics of the past, really trying to recreate them in a way that is ours.”
September: Rogge commissions the “All Talk” lip print by Jorn Olsthoorn for spring 2022. “We like to work with recognizable items,” she said at the time. “It makes people connect…and it’s comforting for people. They get an entrance into something that they understand already.”
2022
February: Rogge named as a semi-finalist for the 2022 LVMH Prize. March: The brand debuts on the Paris Fashion Week calendar.
September: The brand’s spring 2023 collection includes not-for-sale pieces made in collaboration with Swiss artist Beni Bischof.
2023
March: Rogge, who has a knack for finding interesting locations, presents her fall 2023 collection at a bowling alley under the Arc de Triomphe.
October: Uses the runway format for the first time for spring 2024; introduces the swan logo. “We see it as our symbol because it presents a lot of things that are coherent with the brand, for example, elegance, timelessness, but also fierceness and character and independence, and also a link to the country,” the designer has said.
November: A Rogge piece is included in the “Echo” exhibition at MoMu, Antwerp’s fashion museum.
2024
March: Marking her fourth year in business, Rogge stages a show and after-party in the locker-lined basement of the École Duperré.
May: Marries her partner in Salvador Dalí’s hometown of Cadaqués, Spain. Designs four dresses for the festivities, all of which were iterated on in her spring 2025 collection. June: Collaborates with artist Beni Bischof on an installation at MoMU called “Do Nothing Club.”
July: Named a finalist for the ANDAM Prize. September: Speaking of her consulting, tells Vogue Business: “I say this in the most modest way: I think I can really have a vision not only for my brand, but I really like thinking through the eyes of another brand. I feel like I’m good at identifying their DNA, what the brand is about. One of my talents is to combine my vision with someone else’s to create something new and fresh.”
November: Nominated for the 2025 Woolmark Prize. Takes home the Belgian Fashion Awards’ Designer of the Year prize.
2025
January: In collaboration with Sarah Allsopp, launches B. B. Wallace, a knitwear and lifestyle brand.
February: Chloë Sevigny, and other A-listers, wear the brand’s boxer bloomers.
March: “We’re at the moment a team of only women, and we wear our clothes every day,” the designer says.
April: Collaborates with Vitra.
June: Wins ANDAM’s Grand Prize.
July: Meryll Rogge is named as the new creative director of Marni.
