If it wasn’t for falling in love, Marcel Rochas might have ended up practising law. The couturier, who founded his house in 1925 at the age of 23, was persuaded by his fashion-mad first wife to design her wedding dress, and so his journey into fashion began.
This is just one of the revelations found in a new book about him, Marcel Rochas: Designing French Glamour, put together by his daughter Sophie. A mix of glossy picture book and biography, it covers the life and work of a 30-year career. If contemporaries such as Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior are card-carrying members of the 20th-century fashion canon, the name of Marcel Rochas is more obscure, despite the house that still bears his name and its collections Alessandro Dell’Aqua collections. Sophie sees it as an opportunity to put her father’s legacy into fashion’s hall of fame once and for all. “Everything he did was feminine, which was new because at the time it was all about Chanel’s garconne,” she says. “He was always reinventing, full of ideas, and a kind of architect.”
His designs could be seen as the polar opposite of Chanel’s simplicity. Dresses were proper gowns and came with the optimum amount of frills, with lace, wide shoulders and nipped-in waists. His three wives – Sophie is the daughter of the third, Hélène – wore the clothes as his glamorous muses to parties (the book features the photographic evidence), and Rochas himself was something of a pin-up. “He was very handsome, like the [Rudolph] Valentino of couture,” says Sophie. “Women were crazy about him.”
Rochas died in 1955 at the age of 53, when fashion, says Sophie, was “at the big change between couture and ready-to-wear.” While his daughter says she would have liked to have taken over the reins of the house eventually, her mother was resistant and the house was sold. Sophie has since made her own mark, however, working at Elle magazine and designing movie costumes. “I would have worked in fashion if the story had been different,” she says. Perhaps by writing the book on her father, that story has been rewritten.
