John Rocha (Q4848)
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John Rocha is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | John Rocha |
John Rocha is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
1999
interior designer
Scan John Rocha's collections for the past few years and a few preoccupations assert themselves. His is a romantic spirit that tends to the darkly poetic, and he expresses it in extravagant volumes and fabrications. Then, as much as it seems familiar when he trots it out one more time, the penny suddenly drops: This is bloodybeautiful!With his flowing gray locks and Zen mien, Rocha would be ideally cast as some kind of philosopher king of fashion. That impression was certainly helped when he talked about this collection's genesis in his frequent trips to Iceland to fish for salmon (purely for sport—he returns the fish to the sea) and his love of the work of French artist Pierre Soulages, "the painter of black."Organic and dark—that said it all, really. The immediate impression was dictated by the huge, gorgeous hats, ruffles, and corsages Rocha sculpted from organza. They reflected his interest in the pure forms of nature. Then nature insinuated itself in other ways: forest greens, floral appliqués, the fairy-tale shimmer of the glaze on a tiered lace skirt. Nature is messy, not ordered, so there was a charmingdéshabilléquality in Rocha's tattered tweeds and lacquered raffia lace. The first and last looks featured panels of fabric patchworked together with a crust of crochet as dark and glossy as ant's eggs. That sense of sophisticated handwork matched to something intangibly primal might be the essence of Rocha's work. And it seems to have rubbed off on his kids Simone, who'll show on the last day of London's fashion calendar, and Max, who clearly loves a hard-rockin' geetar sound, if his music for today's show was any indication.
14 February 2014
To the litany of great Irish artist/muse relationships—W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne, James Joyce and Nora, Oscar Wilde and Bosie, Francis Bacon and George Dyer—we should probably add John Rocha and his wife, Odette. She clearly inspired his show today. Unrepentant romantic that he is, he's obviously a sucker for Odette's other-timely style, which infused his collection with a dark dreaminess. Its edgiest expression was a black cage dress in an oily plasticized lace; its sweetest, a print that sprayed roses across a flaring skirt. There was a drifty something about the tiered, fluted, airy languor of the dresses that suggested Miss Havisham if she hadn't been such an old misery. Where her love was thwarted, Rocha's was clearly realized in items as poignant as a full-length white tank dress traced with tiny red blossoms, or a white skirt appliquéd with flowers that he'd snared in sheer georgette. Though he was in pursuit of lightness, there was a genuine substance in the way fabrics were worked and embellished. And it was perfectly complemented by picture hats painstakingly constructed, said Rocha, from organza piping. That idea—effortless beauty, arduous effort—rang true as an enduring metaphor for fashion itself.
13 September 2013
"I want to make an old-fashioned woman contemporary," John Rocha declared today, "because I'm an old-fashioned man." With that statement, he anticipated and defused any criticism anyone might choose to level at him about a collection whose strange out-of-time mood is clearly one of this designer's signatures. His invitation listed several dozen people and things he loves, from Hank Williams and David Bowie to his son Max (who did the presentation's music) and Wicklow, the town in Ireland that Rocha said helped inspire the collection. The models' tulle headpieces were based on the wild horses of Wicklow, and the local gypsy population made its presence felt in the wayward flair of crocheted dresses. Part of Rocha's commitment to the contemporary was the fact that the crochet was cashmere, rather than the customary cotton, which added a luxe modern twist.He also claimed proportion and fit were updated in slimmer silhouettes, but the suspicion lingers that the Rocha woman is perfectly happy with the Edwardian volumes of his big A-line coats and jackets and his full-skirted or bell shapes. The heaviness of flared dresses and skirts, densely clotted with appliquéd blossoms or loops and petals of felt, may border on the inelegant, but one imagines some clients would be convinced by their air of studied, old-fashioned craft. Rocha was on safer, more interesting ground with a handful of pieces in glazed black lace, where old and new meshed seamlessly.
15 February 2013
John Rocha has recently been designing a glass chapel in the Château la Coste, an arts center in the south of France. It's made up of 400 square feet of crystal components provided by Waterford, the Irish company for which he designs tableware. Rocha claimed the location inspired the palette of his new collection, with its broom yellow, sky blue, and rose pink, but the strangeness of the concept also involuntarily dictated the mournful mood of the clothes. There was something antique about the silken layers crushed like broken blossoms, the cobweb lace draped over a black mini-crini, the hand-knit skirt in virginal wool spectrally veiled—not to mention the hollow-eyed models in big, squashy hats. They told a story of romance gone terribly wrong, like Dickens' lovelorn Miss Havisham projected half a century forward to the Edwardian era, which Rocha's silhouettes echoed with flaring hips and mid-calf lengths. The idea of a glass chapel somehow only served to underscore shattered illusions. So did the soundtrack, The Kills' version of "Pale Blue Eyes," in which Lou Reed's lyrics detail the angst of a cheating lover.
14 September 2012
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
17 February 2012