SPEAKING VOLUMES
Breakout star designer Rosie Assoulin has secured herself a place among fashion’s best.
In Rosie Assoulin’s New York office, the designer poses a question to the entire room: “What do we want our label to be known for?” “Joy!” she ejects suddenly over the phone, repeating a muffled answer from the group of her staff. “We want people to feel joy! That’s a good answer. What else?” she encourages. “We want women to feel comfortable in their clothes. I love that.”
It is mid-afternoon and Assoulin is reflecting on the mission statement of her four-year-old eponymous label. She has spent much of that time asking a lot of questions. “What is you?” is one she asks herself continually. “Oh my gosh, that is the question,” she says. “Anyone can make something pretty; it is easy to make things beautiful, but what is true to what we are trying to do? I am always asking: ‘Can I wear this? Do I want to wear this? Does this skirt look too big? Do I want to wear heels with it?’ We constantly bring it back into our own personal lives and see if it holds up. If it doesn’t then it is just a pretty idea.”
In an age where creative heads of luxury houses are sequestered in pristine design studios to labour over various confections, Assoulin is a force of the new guard. There’s a lack of pretension in her manner – she uses “we” rather than “I” to describe the label’s accomplishments – and presentations of her collections at New York fashion week are populated by buyers and editors, yes, but close friends and family, too.
If you haven’t been up close to one of her pieces, known for their volume and beautifully looming couture shapes, you might miss their realness. Every piece is centred on an everyday application, even if it has a sculptural shoulder, an enormous peplum flipped on a pair of paper-bag waist trousers, or a pineapple cut-out on a strappy back. She’ll put a pocket in wherever she can. “Sometimes it is a challenge, especially if you have an asymmetrical loopy droopy thing going on,” she explains, “but we are up to it! We put them along seams and zippers and things like that.”
For resort ’17 Assoulin showed tiered gingham and check dresses that swung out at exaggerated A-lines and floor-scraping skirts and pants in full volumes, which she’s made a signature. A happy kick of fruit and vegetables ran throughout – sugar-snap peas, watermelon or artichokes, embroidered onto an organza gown or making up the pieces of a camisole, like a fruit bowl cut and pasted. The crocheted earrings on models looked like hanging clusters of grapes. It’s that sense of fun that people relate to. “Rosie’s playfulness and wit come through in all her designs; and because of that not-so-serious tone, her clothing is very versatile,” says Assoulin’s close friend Claire Olshan, owner of the New York boutique Five Story. “She’s phenomenal at creating clothing that has emotion and should be worn in synchronisation with how one’s feeling.”
“WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO IS MAKE THAT KIND OF DREAM FASHION, RUNWAY MOMENT”
The 31-year-old Assoulin had close contact with fashion before she articulated her own interests in the industry, although not necessarily the front-facing aspects we all know. Her parents worked in manufacturing children’s wear and her great-great grandparents worked in handkerchiefs. Realities of the rag trade were ingrained, which is perhaps why she doesn’t get carried away proselytising about beauty or elegance for their own sakes. “I never wanted to be about wearing the concept. I am not really interested in doing that,” she says with certitude.
“What we are trying to do is make that kind of dream fashion, runway moment. Then can we bring it into our life and can we feel powerful around it and not like it’s dwarfing us?” says Assoulin. A representation of this would be her sell-out Jasmine pants. Cut wide at the leg with undulating swathes of fabric, they’re simultaneously athletic and dressed-up. For resort 2017, a sundress with epaulet-like caps on its shoulders was decorative but still airy enough for a very hot day. A designer who melds traditionally opposed concepts like these is not only dextrous but clever, too.
Assoulin applies this intelligence and pragmatism to dressing a range of body shapes. “Many things look great on certain body types, but what about the other non-standard body types?” she says. “How can we cater to all these different women who we see and work with and live with and know and are?” It’s another question she’s answered with universally flattering fit and flare silhouettes, with trousers – a focal piece every season – like her board-shortsinf luenced pair, and the A-line “B-Boy” styles, with silk-faille dresses that cinch at the waist and off-shoulder tops emphasising the collarbones.
Assoulin (pronounced as-oo-lin) grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. Her grandmother lent her a sewing machine when she was 13, before she helped future mother-in-law Roxanne Assoulin with her jewellery brand. After trying event planning, she turned to fashion with an internship at Oscar de la Renta at 18.
“Maybe it was imposed on me,” she says of her career path. “[My memory’s] clouded by pictures of the crazy stuff your mum puts on you … a stuffed animal, or a flower, or a fruit or vegetable, or stripes and pinks, and bears,” she says. “My mother once pulled out all her baby pictures and laid them out on the table and said: ‘Now do you know why you do what you do?’” It would explain the organic motifs for resort and the beachumbrella stripes that surfaced for spring/ summer ’17.
After de la Renta, whose work ethic and love of eveningwear rubbed off on her, she made her way to Paris, where she bravely ventured backstage post-show at Lanvin in 2009 and waited two hours to ask Alber Elbaz outright if she could work for him. He said yes, and both experiences helped her find her voice that’s underpinned with couture sensibilities and gestural shapes. “There is always a little bit of every person I worked under in my head, but it was a great thing to realise that I had my own voice.”
After her very first season in 2013, she picked up stockists such as Moda Operandi and Miami’s the Webster. In 2015 she won the CFDA Swarovski award for womenswear. Today her label is carried by Bergdorf Goodman, Matchesfashion and Australia’s Parlour X. “Rosie has quite an avant-garde, voluminous yet feminine signature that is not usually aligned with how people dress in Australia, but I do believe the market here will appreciate her theatrical DNA,” says Parlour X’s Eva Galambos. “The Rosie woman is chic, elegant and confident.”
To preserve her voice, she keeps her head down. “Maybe because I have an inferiority complex and I’m like: ‘Oh they are probably just doing it better than I am and I don’t want to do that,’” she says of observing others. “You can’t look too closely at anyone, because I think as the creative person sometimes you can’t help being influenced by things. Otherwise it finds its way into the collection and you’re like: ‘What? How did that Oscar de la Renta get into this office? How did Gap 1992 get into this office?’”
To date, Assoulin has created everything in New York in her 34th Street headquarters. “It’s hard. There are other ways, lots of people will tell us, but we are committed,” she says. As the company expands, the brand has access to artisans who work on details on pieces in other countries, which she hints will be evident in her autumn/winter ’17/’18 collection come February. “It is nice to have that crosscultural connection. That is what we are doing now – reaching out globally.”
As a mother, she is propelled by life back in New York. Assoulin enjoys seeing real women – whether her mother-in-law or friend Leandra Medine – interpret her aesthetic. “They see things in a totally different way outside of the way we’ve been looking at it,” she reflects. She sees her role as putting pieces out as a suggestion, to blend into an existing wardrobe, mixing with other labels. “That moment we have when we are styling, that’s our last moment of control and after that it’s not about us anymore. I love that mix and match; that is what makes it alive.”
Now she’s moving beyond the one-to-watch categorisation of a brand that fashion loves to employ and into stand-alone status. The voice is getting stronger. “Cool stuff that makes you feel good, I guess is what we’re trying to say,” she summarises after the impromptu team round-table wraps up. Only the clothes could have said it better than Assoulin herself.