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When Belgian designer Meryll Rogge got married this May in the northern Spanish town of Cadaqués, the occasion unexpectedly marked a turning point for her business. While she contemplated wearing vintage or dispatching a designer friend to create her bridal looks, she ultimately chose to design for herself.
It opened up a new way of working. “It was a very free experience,” Rogge says from her studio just outside of Ghent, Belgium, two days before her Paris Fashion Week presentation, where new bridal-inspired looks were on display. “I’m used to researching, having lots of discussions, and discarding some very valid ideas because they don’t fit within the frame of the season. This was a whole different approach.” It started not as a collection, but a series of fashion moments, Rogge says. This made room for “guilty pleasures”: references and ideas she’d looked to for a long time, but hadn’t yet had the chance to indulge in. She points to a ’60s Yves Saint Laurent gown that she took inspiration from by sourcing and upcycling white vintage Levis 501s (“the good ones, from the ’80s”) to turn into a patchwork jacket and skirt set. Another wedding look took inspiration from an older Meryll Rogge satin dress.
What didn’t start as a collection soon became one. “Of course, you’re designing one outfit, but then you’re like, ‘oh, we could do a top, and we could do this, and we could do a dress, we could do a pant’. It was a very organic way of designing.”
But don’t expect a body of wedding whites. The collection mixes dressy looks (some white, one red, another black with floral embellishments) with tailored pieces, including a grey chequered coat and gingham blouse and mini-short. In true Rogge fashion, the pieces stray away from anything too girlish, amped up with unexpected twists – metal eyelets cover sheer dresses; raw-hem denim peter pan collars peek out from under jackets.
Rogge’s work exemplifies the merits of women designing for women. The pieces are beautiful and practical, blending softer, more feminine tones via satins and florals with suiting and athletic shapes. Rogge riffs on – and uses – vintage pieces, and looks to specific times and places to inform her collections. This one was no exception.
This process, though, marks a shift in Rogge’s long design history, over which she’s trained under — and worked alongside — some of the greats. Before launching her brand in 2019, Rogge began her career in New York as a womenswear designer for Marc Jacobs (where she worked for seven years), before spending four years back in Belgium at Dries Van Noten as head of design for womenswear. She’s since freelance consulted for both brands, sowing the seed for her budding consulting business, which she runs alongside her brand.
The designer has had a big year. In July, she was a finalist for the 2024 Andam Prize. She’s exhibited in a host of museums, including a solo show at Antwerp’s MoMu museum and a feature in its “Echo” exhibition, which centred on Louise Bourgeois, Simone Rocha and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Celebrities from Hailey Bieber to Rihanna have worn her pieces, generating more buzz than ever. International stockists include Bergdorf Goodman (New York), Maxfield (Los Angeles), Icon (Brussels), Gr8 (Tokyo) and Camargue (Australia). “We worked really hard in the last few years,” Rogge says. “We really were able to show that we are stepping it up. We’re seeing the effects.”
Building the brand
Rogge’s organic design process seeped through to this season’s lookbook and presentation. In seasons past, Rogge has done what she calls a “mini show” — a casual runway during a presentation slot. This season, though, she wanted to convey movement in her lookbook images; not with models walking, but with dancers.
And instead of having these dancers live at the presentation (held at the home of the Ambassador of Belgium in Paris), Rogge blew up the images and presented them alongside associated garments. “We’re putting on a sort of exhibition — but that’s too pompous of a word,” Rogge says. The goal is the opposite. At a “mini show”, Rogge is stuck backstage. This season, she wanted to chat and connect with attendees — and offer them a break. “The editors and stylists, because they run from one [show] to the other, [here] they can enjoy and have a chat and a glass of champagne,” she says.
It’s what the Meryll Rogge brand is all about: serving the client and inspiring people. “We’re creating something useful. I like the word useful — it means that the thing that you’re making has purpose, and that people are actually gonna use it and wear it.”
Brand fans include Rosalía, Jennie, Cate Blanchett and, most recently, Chloë Sevigny. “That was my personal goal,” Rogge says with a smile, after mentioning she’s not overly obsessed with celebs. But personal feelings aside, she knows that, if the brand reaches the right people, it means a lot, “to the buyers, to the team, to the people that are working hard for this brand”.
Having spent so much time at major brands like Marc Jacobs and Dries, Rogge knows how to build a brand for the long haul. VIP dressing is one element. Prizes are another. In July, she was a finalist for the Andam prize. There are more coming up, she hints — but nothing she can share yet. Rogge has mixed feelings about such prizes. She has nothing but positives to say about her Andam experience, but says the prizes can be a double-edged sword. You meet the right people and get exposure — but participating is expensive, and financial support is lacking.
What Rogge is most concerned with, though, is the clothing. This, too, she credits to her time at established labels. “I ve wanted to start a brand since before I was in school,” she says. “But it’s fashion. You can’t learn it in two, three, even four years.” It takes time to learn how fabric moves and reacts; the different finishes for each. It also takes time to learn how to run a business.
This, Rogge says, is her next challenge. She mastered fabrics while in house, and, five years in, has the production process down. “I still have a lot to learn on the business side, because that’s not something that I actively worked in,” she says. “There’s a big learning curve ahead of us — and there’s already one good one behind us.”
Beyond the brand
Rogge has built a solid team. For the brand’s first two years (during peak Covid), her parents helped out. Then she transitioned to a brand team; she now has four full-time employees and 30-something freelance workers over the course of a season. It’s this solid team that enables Rogge to develop her out-of-brand venture: her consulting work.
Rogge began consulting when she went freelance the year before founding the brand. In one season, she consulted for her two alma mater: Dries Van Noten for the first half; Marc Jacobs for the second half. Since, she’s consulted with Dries and Puig on the launch of Dries Van Noten’s perfume and beauty line (which she still works on today). “That was wonderful. It was different than thinking about fashion,” Rogge says. “It was a whole new level of creativity we could tap into.”
It’s the creative outlet of stepping into another brand that drives Rogge to grow her consulting business. “It’s not some obscure consulting job that I know sometimes people do for the financial gains.” The Dries/Puig project has led to other consultancies, Rogge says, but she can’t speak about all of them.
Rogge plans to grow her consulting business even further. To this end, today, she launched a separate Instagram account, Meryll Rogge Creative Consulting (meryllroggebv), to highlight her consulting work on a separate platform than the brand. “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.”
Does this mean she’d go back in-house one day, alongside the Meryll Rogge brand? (Rogge is one of the most-rumoured Dries replacements.) “I think that would be really interesting,” Rogge says. “I still have a lot of creativity and drive and energy to be able to do something bigger. I have more to give than just this.”
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