She exchanges a glance with Ida Aksland, also on the video call, before she continues, “I’ll start it, and then feel free to jump in when you want.” I asked how the duo — co-founders and creative directors of emerging brand, Rogue — first met, a pretty typical question given that they live cities apart: Ida in Oslo, Norway, and Gabrielle in Paris, France. Their story, however, was anything but typical. It started with a TikTok video — nothing strange so far — that Gabrielle posted, proposing to trade her Paris-based apartment for a stay elsewhere. A home swap, if you will. (Yes, just like a modern-day version of The Holiday.) A whole year later, Ida responded. 

Coincidentally, she was planning a trip to Paris for work, and the two agreed to meet over dinner and get to know each other before taking the leap. “We had dinner, and we realized we got along super well and had a lot of common interests,” Gabrielle says. The biggest hurdle to swapping apartments was coordinating schedules, but since both Ida and Gabrielle had spare bedrooms, they decided to stay there instead. On a later trip to Paris, Ida showed up at Gabrielle’s door, suitcase in tow and breathless from climbing several flights of stairs. That’s when she first saw pieces from Gabrielle’s thesis collection — reimagined and remastered Western wear.

Before the stylized, big-buckled fashion that we know of today, Western wear began as practical work gear. Designed to withstand the demands of ranch work and horse-riding, the genre offered up a treasure trove of references to Gabrielle, who spent months studying the history of cowboys and the functionality of their clothes. Take the duster coat, for example — the rugged, weather-beaten uniform of the 19th-century cowboy. Cut from waxed cotton to fend off rain, the coat’s long silhouette keeps it from bunching up when riding a horse, with a back split that’s designed to drape over the saddle. 

Gabrielle revised these predominantly masculine workwear codes, and began experimenting with fabric, form, and proportions inspired by the ’80s and ’90s. She put her own inflection on the garment by giving it a more A-line shape and a detachable shearling collar. She cut chaps out of denim, and exaggerated them by sizing them way, way up, with fringed hems that pool around boots. She attached shearling to another, creating an audaciously large, hulking silhouette. “I immediately was like, ‘OK, wow,” Ida says, later adding, “She didn’t just design some pieces. It’s a whole concept, or at least, like, in my eyes, like the beginning of a concept that can be … a brand.” 

Ida’s reaction wasn’t unlike my own when I saw Rogue in the wild. I met Gabrielle and Ida during Copenhagen Fashion Week earlier this year, almost 5,578 miles from where I’m interviewing them now. I was hoofing it to a show when I noticed them both in my periphery — Gabrielle, in an all-white, head-to-toe fringed denim look, and Ida in a long duster and sand-colored cowboy hat. I can’t remember who stopped first (it was most likely me), but we struck up a conversation. When I asked about their looks, they handed me a card. Rogue. Even after we went our separate ways, those looks never left my mind. 

Western wear trots in and out of fashion every few years. In a time when interest in cowboy everything is surging again, Rogue’s arrival feels timely, mainly because it reaches for something bigger and more authentic. “There’s a Rogue energy that comes with wearing our pieces — bold, unpredictable,” Gabrielle tells me. “You can be the cool girl and dress it down, but you can also, like, really style it up and make your statement.” Last month, the duo launched their first product: a more wearable version of their oversized chaps. So, I sat down with Gabrielle and Ida (virtually, of course) to learn more about the release, the co-founders’ backstory, and their social media meet-cute. Following are edited and condensed excerpts. 

Gabrielle, you’re originally from Atlanta, Georgia, right? How long have you been in Paris? 

Gabrielle: I’m going on a little over four and a half years now, actually. 

Tell me a little bit more about how you got your start in fashion. What brought you to Paris?

Gabrielle: Back in high school, I was super into drawing and painting, specifically realism, which is super far from fashion design. But I visited France for the first time when I was 16, and I knew I had to move here at some point in time. That’s the trip that led me down the path of, OK, maybe I want to go into fashion — because for the longest time, I didn’t actually think about it. I thought I wanted to go into the medical field. So, I started taking sewing classes when I was 17, and I did some fashion summer camps at Kent State University in Ohio. 

No way — that’s where I went to journalism school. 

Gabrielle: Oh, yeah! I went to a one-week summer program with Kent State University School of Fashion because it’s a pretty decent fashion school in the U.S. Now, my mom actually lives in Akron. 

What a small, small world. 

Gabrielle: I know. Then, I applied to go to fashion school at Pratt Institute and Parsons Paris. I heard back from Parsons Paris, and it just felt right. Then, I moved over here. The first year of school here is very foundational, and the second year is when you get into actual fashion design. That was kind of where I started. 

Ida, I want to hear your story. 

Ida: I think that I have always been creative, but also loved working with strategies, ideas, and concepts. […] I’m from a super small [town] on the west side of Norway, and I remember buying, for example, wide-legged jeans when I was young. I bought them, but I couldn’t dare to wear them in school because, again, I was from such a small place. Everyone’s so focused on fitting in, and it’s scary to stand out. I had those pairs for one and a half years before I dared to even wear them. So, I mean, I’ve always had those visions and been creative in that way. 

I ended up studying graphic design, and I applied for that, just because that was a way I could be creative. I had actually started designing logos when I was super young. I think I took my first paid project when I was 15, and then I started my business when I was 17, and from then on, I basically have been running my own company doing graphic design. When I studied it, I started working even more and getting more freelance clients. But then, I applied for an internship doing graphic design at one of Norway’s biggest fashion houses, Holzweiler. I wanted to do something else other than just graphic design in a graphic design studio, and they wanted to take me in. I think that was when I realized that, the things I’m learning in graphic design school, I could really use that competence in so many ways.

So, what was the moment that first sparked the idea to create your brand? What made you think, “OK, I’m just going to do this with this girl I just met”?

Ida: I fell in love with the collection and everything behind it. I’m really business-minded, so I was just immediately like, “Oh my God, the Scandinavian market would love this.” I didn’t tell Gabrielle then, but that was definitely in the back of my head from the first time I saw the collection — especially after Gabrielle said that her dream would be to have her own brand. We didn’t really talk business that whole week; we were just having so much fun together. But when we left each other, we knew we were going to meet again. 

Gabrielle: We didn’t talk about it, but then Ida sent a message afterwards […] and that was the beginning of the conversation of: What could this become? 

So, what was the moment that first sparked the idea to create your brand? What made you think, “OK, I’m just going to do this with this girl I just met”?

Gabrielle: I’ll start with Oslo Runway because that was a huge moment. I think we got our Instagram up, like, two days before. 

Ida: But then again, from when we first started talking about it, and up until that point, we were like, Hmm, what could the name be? What is our ambition? We talked and talked about all of that because we both had so many ideas. I feel like I then understood that we were going to work pretty well together because I felt [a sense of] respect. Even though we just had Instagram up for two days, before Oslo Runway, we had a lot of ideas. In our heads, we had a whole concept and a whole brand. Then, it was just figuring out how to get it out there. Oslo Runway was our first test to see if this had potential in the Scandinavian market. That was a part of the strategy pretty early — to go for the Scandinavian market.

So, let’s talk about Rogue. Cowboy culture and Western wear are steeped in rugged masculinity — what drew you to reinterpret that for womenswear?

Gabrielle: Growing up, my parents went to the Rodeo Finals in Vegas every single year. My mom was super into Western fashion. She owned 45-plus pairs of cowboy boots, and our whole house was decorated with cow hides and leather. I didn’t grow up on a ranch or anything, but I feel like I have a good background [on Western wear], so I really wanted to take an authentic approach. Like you said, it is really masculine, and there’s a big focus on workwear. For example, in the collection, we have the duster coats, the chaps, and the denim, of course. I wanted to take these super traditional Western wear elements of design, and a big part of the shapes and volumes actually come from ’80s and ’90s inspiration of classic archetypes. So, that’s why there’s this merging of super voluminous, elegant shapes with notes of Western wear.  

What drew you to those decades in particular?

Gabrielle: As a designer, I really like designing big, oversized shapes — these long coats and the really big sleeves that were really popular in the ’80s and ’90s. That’s why I gravitated towards those eras of fashion as my reference. The way I design is by collaging. So, I have all my Western wear research and all my ’80s and ’90s research, and then everything in my sketchbook is just this combination of the two worlds.

It seems like you have a very well-honed and thorough research process. Tell me more about that. 

Gabrielle: The research phase for developing the collection was a couple months long. All of it came from libraries in Paris — nothing was from any online sources. They were archival photos from Western wear and workwear books. I think that’s a huge part of the design process — having a rich research base. When you’re collecting research, you start to find ties between things. For example, in Western wear, you have the Elvis side of things — the Nudie Cohn suits, all the studs and big colors. But then you also have the more vintage rodeo, more of the practical, ranch wear. So that was [the route] I decided to go down. 

I had stacks of probably 600 pages of printed research. You just start to connect things, and then suddenly, you kind of arrive at a concept. It’s kind of hard to go into the research phase being like, “This is exactly what I want.” I feel like you kind of stumble upon it, and then all of a sudden, you have a collection in front of your hands, and you have a great base to work from. 

How do you source your fabrics, and what informs those decisions?

Gabrielle: So when it comes to choosing fabric for the collection, you have to think: OK, can this fabric be repeated multiple times, and do they all work well together? In the collection, there’s cotton poplin that you can see in those dark, red-wine colored garments as well as white cotton poplin and white denim. The other specific fabric that is used is waxed cotton. The reason I chose to use that was because duster coats originally are made from waxed cotton. It’s waterproof, and it’s pretty durable. There’s shearling — the tigrado sheepskin for the wooly chaps. I also decided to add a detachable collar to the duster coat. The shearling is nice because it’s a byproduct of the meat industry. 

Were there any other traditional techniques you discovered during your research that influenced your design process?

Gabrielle: It’s a lot of leather handwork and knot-tying. [Traditional] chaps usually have chap snaps and a concho to secure one side to the other — and that has specific knot-tying that I did learn while I was making prototypes. But [in my designs], we chose to go with metal eyelets and D-rings, because it fit more of where the collection was going. But also, duster coats are very traditional. I made it more Rogue with the way I designed it to be an A-line jacket. Some of the details are more exaggerated, but at the end of the day, you could technically go ride a horse in our duster coat. It was made for that. The way the flaps are cut in the back with the vent, it’s supposed to be able to sit over a saddle. 

Ida: I think that was something that I found super cool with the whole collection and the thing I like a lot about it — it is really taking all of these garments that were supposed to be functional, and you’re kind of still keeping the function, but giving it like a new use. I really like how the fabrics and everything were made to actually be functional. 

What does your creative collaboration look like day to day? How do you challenge and complement each other?

Ida: We communicate 24/7. We’ve been on many trips together. We also call a lot, and there are all these voice messages. That’s the first thing; it’s a lot of communication. I think that we are similar in so many ways, which makes it easy for us to work together, because I think we both have the combination of being super creative, but also determined and ambitious and hard workers. […] We have worked together for basically a year, and I feel like it’s going really well. When we get stressed or overwhelmed, or when we disagree on something, we’re so great at communicating around it, and falling back on the fact that we trust each other’s competence. 

Gabrielle: I feel like we make the largest leaps in terms of Rogue when we’re together and just out grabbing a coffee or something. Because when we’re together, we have, like, set working times, but at the same time, I feel like the best conversations and the best ideas just come from us being out at dinner, walking home, having a drink out. And we won’t mean to get onto the topic of Rogue, but we’re just both so passionate, and we have such big ambitions and goals for the brand, that it just kind of naturally comes up. 

How do you see Rogue evolving over the next few seasons? 

Ida: Rogue has become something that is more than just a fashion brand for us. Our first product that we’re ever gonna release is not just like a product. It feels like introducing a new segment to the Scandinavian fashion world, and also making chaps something you have in your closet alongside your jeans. In Norway, during the winter, having a pair of chaps is very practical. […] Rogue is also a way of behaving, a way of being. It’s now so easy to be like, “That’s Rogue.” We play around with that tone of voice and the boldness and unpredictability of what we think Rogue is and what that word gives out. We really are building this attitude that we really, really love.