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Rogan's Soulful Minimalism

Rogan Gregory, the designer behind eponymous men’s and women’s wear label Rogan, as well as Loomstate and Edun, is a man whose primary design goal is to strip things down to their most essential state while still creating something new - and most importantly, to add something raw and real to the process and the end result. Gregory calls this “soulful minimalism.”

“It’s minimalism in the true sense of the word - stark and super simple,” he said in his New York showroom on Wednesday, Nov. 5, during a presentation of his Spring 2009 collection.

For Gregory, it’s a version of minimalism that is scratched up and carefully imperfect - “some balance in its imbalancedness,” he explained. Sculptor Richard Serra - his large-scale sculptures of enormous curved pieces of steel are at once aggressive monsters and gentle giants - have been one source of inspiration for Gregory. Serra’s, like Gregory’s, is a minimalism that’s been left to rust, weather and age. The forms maybe be singular, but not antiseptic.

Gregory pointed to the concrete floor inside his showroom to illustrate his point.

“When they first poured it, they made it perfect and smooth. And I looked at it and thought, no...that’s not right,” he said. It needed more texture, something a little bit more rough and messed up. A concrete floor it may be, but it still needed more soul.

For Spring 2009, Gregory looked to one particular group known for their unadorned and functional attire: the Amish. A friend in the Midwest had found him an Amish jacket and pair of pants, used (“they smelled like a farm”), and he was taken with their elegant simplicity. “All of the design is done on the inside,” he said, and explained that that it had only interior pockets - six of them - and hidden stitching.

He took this detail and “riffed and expanded” on it, exploring everything from Amish quilting and its geometric forms. In the women’s collection, this meant everything from softly worn A-line trompe l’oeil shift dresses with contrasting blocks of triangular shapes, and geometric “bat-wing” tops. In the men’s version, he designed wide, higher-waisted men’s pants, slightly bow-legged and with almost no topstitching. Jackets were boxy, and shorter, made from a light suiting wool and linen (here’s where they differed from the Amish, who makes their out of durable, though less odor-forgiving, polyester).

For Fall, Gregory said he was moving towards a more refined, edited version of the scruffy minimalism he’s been doing, continuing to explore conceptual design problems that are executed from a practical standpoint.

“Letting the shape speak for itself, letting the fabric speak for itself,” he said, as he defined his theory of “reductive design.” He’s also experimenting with the combination of two contradictory fabrics, figuring out how to make them work together in a minimal way, such as a heavier peacoat wool combined with a ribbed knit. “If you can pull it off, then its something that people really haven’t seen before,” he said.

For Gregory, a spirit of experimentation and a “I’ve got nothing to lose” attitude are essential in the current market, combined with a more enlightened view of the impact of one’s business on the world.

“We don’t have the luxury from an economic or ecological standpoint to design whatever we feel like designing,” said Gregory. “We can’t just go out and get something exotic, what’s the point? We have to do something new.”

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