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Late last spring, Italian designer Alessandro Vigilante discreetly took up the women’s wear reins at the struggling house of Rochas, becoming the sixth creative director to succeed its founder. His first capsule collection was produced in less than six weeks and shown to some editors in July.
Though a relative unknown, the Puglia native is hardly a newcomer: In 2006, while a student at IED Moda Lab in Milan, he was invited by Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani to show his collection during Milan Fashion Week. He graduated with honors the next year and embarked on a career dressing celebrities like Monica Bellucci, Scarlett Johansson, and Jennifer Lopez at Dolce Gabbana before moving to Gucci where he outfitted Lupita Nyong’o in a green pleated gown at Cannes, Salma Hayek, Madonna, and many others, and on to the studios of Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini and The Attico.
In 2020, Vigilante launched a namesake brand organized into “Acts” with “body” in the titles, a reference to his 15 years of dance training (his Instagram account is headlined “Decorate your body with movements”). The fall 2023 collection, Atto VIII - Celebrating Body, features low-slung trousers in cream-colored satin paired with a matching bralette and a very high-cropped top, and an avocado green bustier dress made of natural vegan rubber layered over a lilac bodysuit in ribbed stretch cotton.
When the Rochas job came up, a co-owner at its licensee, Himco, recommended him to Philippe Benacin, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Interparfums. The CAC-40 company, which Benacin said will post sales of €800 million in 2023, owns the Rochas portfolio, which includes fragrances like Eau de Rochas, Madame Rochas, and Femme, plus a dozen or so others, accounting for between €40 and €45 million euros. Rochas is also Interparfums’s sole fashion label.
Founded by Marcel Rochas in 1925, the house flourished in the golden era of haute couture, in the 1950s. “Its identity is rooted in the idea of elegant femininity and audacious Parisian refinement, and the house still has name recognition today despite its relative discretion these past few years,” said Serge Carreira, a business lecturer at Sciences Po. “The succession of talented art directors in the past 15 years shows that the house is still trying to find the magic formula.” Having zigzagged between designers and licenses since its purchase from Procter Gamble in 2015, Rochas now has a strategy that Benacin believes will draw a new audience to fashion through perfume and vice versa. The key to success? Consistency.
“Before going high profile, the collections have to be good, there has to be coherence,” he said during a joint interview with Cordelia Simon, head of licensing at Interparfums. “The trick is to spend when you sense that things are properly lined up, and spend intelligently. When you’re doing two, five ,or seven million [euros, in sales] you don’t need three million followers, what you need above all is to have serious clients who know that you’re growing your business little by little.”
By way of comparison—and on a different order of magnitude—Benacin pointed to how Interparfums launched the Montblanc, Coach, and Jimmy Choo fragrances “from zero.” Today, he said, each one of those franchises generates nearly €200 million in sales. For Rochas fragrances, the goal is to reach €50 million in 2025, bolstered by the launch of a new franchise. For fashion, the initial target is approximately €6 million in sales, slightly less than the €9 million that Benacin said the company has poured into Rochas to date. “At [sales of] €50 million, you start to really exist in perfume,” he said. “Fashion’s much smaller,” he added, calculating that selling the brand in 500 stores would be the equivalent to 20,000 doors in perfumery terms.
Next year will officially mark the Rochas reboot, with licensing a thing of the past, new offices next to Interparfums’s grand hôtel particulier on the Left Bank, a new worldwide distribution partner in Tomorrow, a presentation at Paris Fashion Week, and possibly a runway show for the spring 2025 collection. The core of the collection will retail in the €1,000 to €2,000 range; leather accessories will also be a part of the mix.
“It’s really a new adventure that’s getting underway,” said Benacin.
Somewhere behind the Interparfums headquarters, pieces from the Rochas archives have already moved into an otherwise empty apartment on the fourth floor of a stately building with lavish if faded walls painted in trompe l’oeil marble. These include about a dozen ensembles by Marcel Rochas from the post-war era, circa 1947 to 1951, with the hourglass shapes that dominated then; and more then 200 documents spanning original sketches, Rochas’s first ads, press reviews, and magazines from the late 1920s through the early 1950s.
In the salon were mannequins dressed in ensembles by some of Vigilante’s predecessors. They included a bird-print coat over-embroidered with black beaded birds from Alessandro Dell’Acqua’s spring 2015 collection marking the house’s 90th anniversary. Opposite stood one of Olivier Theyskens’s first designs for Rochas, for fall 2003, a long, two-tiered dress in pale pink overlaid with black lace inspired by the archives and worn on the runway by Stella Tennant. Over on the Right Bank, the Musée Galliera, MAD, and the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa hold many more pieces, as do the MET, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum, and Sophie Rochas, the founder’s daughter, who published a monograph on her “famous unknown” father in 2015.
Now steeped in Rochas history, Vigilante had never entertained the idea of working for a Parisian house before. “It’s exciting when something unexpected happens,” he said. “For 16 years, I translated the vision of other creative directors; now I really need to speak in my own voice. As a dancer, everything is about the body and movement. It’s not just making fashion that has to be ‘wow,’ it’s about doing clothes that make you feel stronger, powerful, and self-confident because you feel really, really good in them.”
The designer, who turns 41 on December 23, quit dancing at 23 to attend fashion school. But its lessons are key to resituating Rochas in the current landscape, he said. The stylistic tension between Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham (both of whose techniques he has studied) offers a constant source of inspiration. So does the work of Jiří Kylián, and the “movement language” called the Gaga technique.
“Contemporary dance is open to everybody, every size, to what you want to say, and to creating new languages. And that is what I would like to do,” Vigilante said. But he doesn’t want to lose sight of the archives, either. “Being able to touch these pieces is like opening the door to Marcel’s first atelier, it gives me goosebumps,” he said as he lifted a wasp-waisted pink tulle and black lace guêpière out of tissue paper. “You discover the fabrics, sketches, the scent. You see the lace, which was really iconic for him, that I would like to renew in my own way. Lace can be intimate, feminine, and not overtly erotic. So, it’s also a challenge.”
Other house signatures include the mermaid dress, 3/4-length coats, pajama-style resort wear, and, most famously, the surrealist Oiseau (bird) dress of 1934, a long black evening sheath with a gigantic white seagull draped around the neck. There is also the memory of Rochas’s three wives: Yvonne, Rina, and the glamorous, much younger Helene, who became CEO of Rochas and was a social fixture in Paris and on the Riviera. And there is the work of predecessors he knows and admires, such as Theyskens, Dell’Acqua, and Marco Zanini.
“I would like to bring from them the femininity and delicacy, but I think there’s so much of Marcel’s that would be right for this moment, but not in a vintage or nostalgic way, a more wearable way,” Vigilante offered, running through some ideas for feathers (but not real ones), mermaid hemlines (but in different proportions), stripes, and “lots of trousers.”
“Rochas loved detail, anatomical cuts, especially the invisible ones. I think that is elegance now. It’s a new kind of couture, like a caress,” he said, adding that his Rochas woman is around 35 and up. “We will be talking to younger generations too, but it has to be a core wardrobe, something really easy to wear, without frills so that it is modern and fast and real, something for women of character and talent,” he added. “I imagine the new Rochas woman as someone who doesn’t follow the trends, she has her own personality and I love the way she wears her clothes.”
“For me,” he continued, “fashion is like creating a new language through movement, the fabrics, the shape. The woman, the body, has to be at the center of my research. The clothes aren’t empty, they’re like a second skin. You have to really feel like yourself.”