Even more bad news for Gap

Mouret_gap Oh dear, oh dear... Just when Gap thought things couldn't get much worse for them, the chain has been forced to slash the prices of its exclusive Roland Mouret designed dresses, which you'll now find filling the sales racks at the store in vast quantities, apparently. Personally, I claim to be surprised by this: when a dress makes even lovely Lily Cole look like she's wearing a sack, you just know it can't be good...

What I do wonder, though, is what this whole mess will do for Roland Mouret. The Galaxy dress made his name, but will the Gap's dresses ruin it again?

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Even more bad news for Gap - Comments

djinni

The difference, Amber, is that Stella McCartney for H&M was supposed to be a limited collection. (Oh, it, too, didn't sell out. I picked up several pieces of Stella H&M in the sales that year. The yellow camisole trimmed in rhinestone, now featured in a Dove deodorant ad, cost me 4.99 quid. So not even Ms. McCartney is immune to the markdown!)

The Roland Mouret dresses were not limited. Nor were they marketed as such. His name is nowhere on the label or mentioned in point of sale advertising - the line was merely called the Ten Dress Collection.

The dresses were widely available, and what is amazing is that some styles DID sell out right away.

I happen to like some of them, and have three of the sold out styles myself - wore one on New Year's Eve to great acclaim (and comfort!) I've been looking for the dresses since they came out and, while I haven't been to the sales this week, I know that the Covent Garden, the tatty end of Oxford Street, and the King's Road Gaps also had just the three styles above soon after the dresses were released.

The British press has blown the leftover dresses up into a non-story - but then that is par for the course for the British press, which gets things wrong far more often than they get them right. In my opinion.

Amber

I don't live in London, djinni, so I'm afraid I haven't seen the story you're referring to. I would imagine that different branches will have different amounts of stock left of the dresses - I think some sections of the media are just surprised that there is any stock left at all, as it was expected that the collection would sell out very quickly, a la Stella McCartney for H&M, etc, and that doesn't appear to have been the case.

Isabelle

I never understood the fuss about his collection for Gap. When a designer known for his fabric drapery and body slimming tricks showcases a collection of unremarkable sack dresses it screams cash in.

djinni

I'm afraid the story in the Evening Standard, from where I assume you took the story, is a bit of an exaggeration. I was in the Gap Oxford Circus just before Christmas, and while there were a few racks of the Roland Mouret dresses on sale, it was just three styles (oddly enough, the three in the photo). The other seven dresses were nowhere to be found, and if you go on Ebay, the most coveted styles are still selling at a premium.

I doubt this will hurt Mouret's name - his name is nowhere on the dresses and the average punter would have no clue he's involved.

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Even more bad news for Gap

Even more bad news for Gap - Comments

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