Au Revoir Mouret!

  As I mentioned before, I was going to go to the final Roland Mouret sample sale to gawp and bid adieu to Roland Mouret as it ceases to be designed by the man himself.  And so off to the sale I went on Thursday during my lunch break.  Now it was on the other side of town from work so when I got there, I timed it so that I had 15 minutes shopping time.  I figured everything would be WAY out of my price range and I was only there to soak upthe atmosphere.  How wrong was I!  When I got to the Roland Mouret studio, there were about 12 women there GRABBING stuff and changing right there in front of the rails to try things on.  It was like the most MANIC sample sale I’ve ever been to.  Most probably, everyone was a slave to the clock as well. 

I gingerly started lifting price tags and I saw double figures written on them, as in, under £100.  My heart soared!  I could afford this stuff!  The stock spanned from recent resort collections to early 2003 collections.  Prices getting steeper of course with the more recent collections.  There was also a lovely rack of Christian Louboutin shoes worn in the catwalk shows  priced at £150 and under (too high for me though!)  I started getting into the grabbing groove along with the other women.  I wasn’t even looking at sizing and just took arms full of stuff.  I grabbed mainly skirts, dresses and tops so I was not too bothered about trying stuff on and just kind of used my hand span to roughly measure everything (it’s about 2.5 of my handspans across the waist!).

Here’s a small selection of what I saw:

Then as I was totting up everything in my head, I saw *gasp* the man himself, Roland Mouret standing there looking bemused at these crazy women trying on his stuff in this frenetic fashion.  I’m not sure a lot of women noticed him there.  I so wanted to get into fashion journalism mode and pluck up the courage to ask him questions I was dying to know i.e. WHY are you leaving? He probably would have told me to get stuffed but in any case, I had about 5 minutes left on the clock.  So I gawped for about 2 nanoseconds and then proceeded to pay for my goodies.  Here was the damage…. 

Resort 05 raw silk dress in grey w/ cream sash – £45 (RRP£350)

Pre winter 05 checked dress – £45 (RRP £550)

Toucan silk skirt w/ gathered waist – £20 (RRP £150)

Cotton and satin headband – £10 (RRP…who knows!  Apparently, these headpieces weren’t made for sale – just for the catwalk shows….)

I’m not sure what made me buy it, but it makes me feel sort of 1920’s/40’s flapper girl/land girl esque….. I rather like that sort of thing!

The SA kindly gave me the original prices just so I could feel that extra bit better about finding such bargains.  As I was paying for the stuff, there were signs informing people that there were no Galaxy or Titanium dresses for sale (of course!) but as I went to enter my pin number at their credit card machine in the office, there were rails and rails of what were apparently the last shipment of those infamous dresses – I may have been reading too much into it but I did see Roland looking sort of wistful/slightly saddened.  Kind of did make me sad as well.  Ah well, I got my little splurge in and hopefully have contributed to my wardrobe inheritance to pass down to whoever wants my stinking rags.