As a teenager living in rural Belgium in the late 1990s, Meryll Rogge, inspired in part by her love of European fashion magazines and the Canadian TV show “Fashion File,” wrote a list of the three designers she most wanted to work for later in life: Marc Jacobs, Dries Van Noten and Miuccia Prada. Since graduating from the prestigious fashion program at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2008, Rogge, now 35, has checked off two of the three. After university, she moved to New York and worked with Jacobs for seven years, first as an intern and eventually as one of the lead women’s wear designers, before relocating to Antwerp and heading women’s wear design at Van Noten’s eponymous brand for three years. In 2019, when the time came to make her next move, rather than try for a hat trick, Rogge instead decided to found her own namesake label — not in Milan or New York or Antwerp but in a 19th-century Flemish barn nine miles southwest of Ghent.
Surrounded by lush green lawn, the whitewashed stone building is an erstwhile cowshed located on the five-acre property, a former farm, where her family has lived since Rogge was 6. In 2004, her parents transformed the 840-square-foot space into a light-flooded studio, with 23-foot-tall ceilings, to be used for parties and family gatherings; Rogge moved in last fall and has since added shelving for rolls of fabric, racks crammed with samples and muslin toiles and a long handcrafted wooden worktable at its center. When we spoke in late March, she was sitting alone in the space, watching her neighbor, a dairy farmer, drive his tractor across the field beyond. While her primary reason for establishing her line outside of a major city was the ability to invest the money she’d save on rent in fabrics and manufacturing, “the quietness of the country might have been exactly what I needed,” she said. “I can stay in my own bubble and remain focused.” She created her first collection last September with a remote team of freelance patternmakers and textile and embroidery designers who took day trips here from either Paris or Antwerp, where they are based. “They loved it,” she said. “It’s a breath of fresh air.”
In February, before much of Western Europe went into lockdown, Rogge traveled to Paris to present that collection during fashion week, in a showroom overlooking Le Carreau du Temple in the Marais. An eclectic mix of retro-inspired knitwear (slouchy striped wool sweaters and oversize cardigans), roomy masculine tailoring (double-breasted jackets, pleated striped wool pants) and seductive party attire (a black velvet fitted dress with bejeweled spaghetti straps, a white leather pencil skirt with a crotch-high slit), the offering was inspired by the glamorous nightlife of early 1980s New York, and the somewhat melancholic figures she imagined lingering about the city’s streets come dawn.
Rogge likens the early stages of conceiving a new collection to being on a scavenger hunt and, in this instance, she had been looking at the skin-baring tops and flared fitted dresses worn by Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in “The Last Days of Disco,” Whit Stillman’s 1998 ode to New York’s early ’80s club scene. She was thinking, too, of David Armstrong and Nan Goldin’s 1994 book “A Double Life,” a collection of the two photographers’ portraits of their friends and lovers. Rogge was drawn to the way Armstrong and Goldin’s clique expressed their individualism through their clothes. “They really embraced whatever they were wearing, and there was an aspect of spontaneity in how they dressed,” she said. Their knack for mixing feminine silhouettes with borrowed men’s wear, often in vintage cuts, resonated with her own magpie approach to style, which she captured in the look book for her collection. In the images, photographed in and around Antwerp by the French photographer Anthony Seklaoui, Rogge layers contrasting silhouettes and colors in seemingly effortless, unexpected combinations: A high-gloss aqua satin shirt appears beneath a black velvet camisole; a chunky fluorescent pink-and-yellow pullover offsets a white leather skirt and is accessorized with what the designer calls her “glove boa,” a scarf, slung across the lower back and cut from brilliant red Italian double duchess satin, that morphs at its ends into a pair of oversize gloves.
Despite the youthful energy behind her label, Rogge is a veteran of the luxury fashion world and has a talent for recasting familiar styles into lavish, immediately desirable items. Rustic wool cardigans with loose silhouettes are lined with cashmere or soft merino wool; a decadent mid-calf-length coat, which will be available in limited numbers, was handcrafted by a retired furrier, who has previously worked for Chanel, from strips of vintage fur in earthy shades from sand to chestnut brown. And to create the electric rose print that appears in either neon yellow or peach across her viscose dresses, she enlisted a textile mill based in Lyon, France, that is owned by the storied luxury brand Hermès. “When Dries came by to view the collection in Paris and saw the duchess satin, he said, ‘I see that you splurged!’” she recalled with a laugh. “There are a lot of fabrics that mimic satin, but they never have the same depth of color.”
Since her line’s debut, Rogge has received orders from stores including Bergdorf Goodman and Net-a-Porter, but with almost every facet of the fashion industry — from manufacturing to retail — at a standstill because of the pandemic, she has had to reassess her production schedule. If certain businesses are able to reopen before the summer, her fall collection will likely arrive in stores in September, instead of July or August as is typical. But the creative part of her practice is much unchanged: Working in relative isolation was always part of Rogge’s plan. In the future, she and her boyfriend, Clement Van Vyve, a designer and environmental psychologist, hope to be based even farther from Europe’s fashion capitals. “Our ultimate dream is to find a place along the Atlantic coast, in Spain or Portugal, and have parts of the team come over for a week or two,” she said. “I don’t believe in locking people up in the office. It kills the spirit. We will try to continue to work in this liberated way for as long as we can.”