Meryll Rogge is one of those IYKYK designers—beloved by those who are partial to witty exercises in deconstruction, unexpected proportions, unusual materials, and a borrowed-from-the-grandparents vibe. Lately, she has been extending her reach: Since Rogge launched her label in 2020, her glove boa in red duchesse silk has gone viral; Rihanna has been spotted in Meryll Rogge boxer bloomers; Chloë Sevigny stepped out in one of her vintage-y slip dresses. In late June she took home the 2025 Andam Grand Prize, and a few weeks later was named the new creative director of Marni. Her just-launched knitwear line, B.B. Wallace—all double-face knits, cashmere, and Fair Isles, in colors from green apple and buttermilk to truffle, lilac, and burgundy—while still very Meryll, seems set to bring her to an even wider audience. Rogge, who developed the brand with knitwear specialist Sarah Allsopp, sees the project as “one more expression of creativity, but in a different world—it’s like how Damon Albarn has many bands.”
It’s tempting to think of B.B. Wallace (a portmanteau of Rogge’s young sons’ names, Bill and Wallace) as fitting the designer’s universe in much the same way a baby matryoshka relates to the mother doll: Nesting is very much the vibe.
Cotton pointelle tanks and skirts were inspired by her youngest son’s onesies, and mini versions of some of the items are planned. The focus on comfort and warmth, meanwhile, is a response to the Belgian designer’s real-life needs. Rogge, who says that she had always wanted to work “a bit off-grid,” is based in the small town of Deinze, near Ghent, where she works from a stone house with a red-tiled roof, her windows open to a view of acres of surrounding fields, where horses graze.
Photo by Loïc Van Der Heyden. Courtesy of B.B. WALLACE.
This area of East Flanders was once home to the Latemse School of painters, whose work recorded their bucolic surroundings. While Rogge’s inspirations and reach extend far beyond Flanders, or Belgium for that matter, she carries forth the creative legacy by naming each piece—all of them made of natural fibers and built to last—after an English or American artist. Sherman (as in Cindy) is a crewneck cardigan that conjures the artist as a sweater girl. A short-sleeve sweater is called Emin (what else?), while Riley (as in Bridget) features a checkered pattern created with floating yarns. David Bowie gets a shout-out in relation to a deconstructed wool button-up vest with a trompe l’oeil doubling effect and a single streamer extending from the neckline.
As a graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, it is only natural that Rogge found her way to deconstruction. After all: This is the school that birthed the so-called Antwerp Six, who put Belgium on the fashion map almost 40 years ago. Rogge, then, is one of a new generation of designers building upon and adapting that legacy for the way we live now. Add to her academic credentials years of experience working side by side in New York with Marc Jacobs, followed by a stint back in Antwerp as Dries Van Noten’s head of women’s design. She has fond memories of “doing little fabric allocations at seven in the morning at Dries’s desk, with a view of the harbor and the boats.” (She continues to consult on the brand’s beauty and fragrance lines.) With Jacobs, Rogge explains, each collection was distinct—“there was never a reference or fabric that was the same—and then, of course, at Dries it was the total opposite.”
If B.B. Wallace is the country to Rogge’s city—in its focus on continuity of design rather than continuous change—it also introduces the welcome concept of what the designer calls gezelligheid: coziness, Belgian style. (Take that, hygge.)
