Roland Mouret: the Butcher's Boy Who Dressed the World

Roland Mouret's influence on the fashion world - from The Dress, to the fashion front-lines of Paris, London and New York, to mentoring Victoria Beckham - cannot be ignored.

But though you know his work, you don't know his story.Born the son of a butcher in a rural village in the Pyrenees, his first encounter with fabric and form aged seven was folding his butcher's apron to avoid the blood.

He found his way into fashion through modelling, a short stint at fashion school and photoshoot styling, against a backdrop of glamour, clubbing, sex and all that being a gay man in the 90s in Paris and London entailed.

But he found his true passion the moment he started to drape fabric over a mannequin - just as he had with his apron decades earlier.Mouret's clothes were something new, stemming from a wonder at and respect for the female form.

Others were making clothes by the rules, and finding the women who fit those rules too.

But Mouret looked at the woman first, and created clothes that gave her power - something that came naturally to a person who had had to fight his way to find his place in the world.

After a career creating the clothing that lets people tell their fashion stories, he's ready to tell his own.Roland Mouret is a French fashion designer based in London.

Mouret was born in 1961.

His father was a butcher; his mother worked as a maid in one of the abundant hotels catering to Lourdes's influx of religious devotees.

Those strange conflicting worlds, of flesh and bone, of religion, of working uniforms and saintly drapery, marked his young life, moulding his nascent aesthetic.

Thirty-six years later, their inherent contradictions would fuse together, when Roland Mouret sat down, and draped a dress.