Simone Rocha (Q7621)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Simone Rocha is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Simone Rocha |
Simone Rocha is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
The Old Bailey, London’s historic and still operating central criminal court, was the scene this evening of a Simone Rocha show whose collection was flagrantly and premeditatedly planned never to be an open-and-shut case. Instead it was rich in nuance, intrigue and insinuation. “When people see the collection I want them to have license to interpret it themselves” said Rocha at a preview, adding: “I’d never be interested in fashion that’s defining a look or defining how someone should feel.”One fact beyond reasonable doubt was that a core influence was dance. Michael Clark and Pina Bausch were cited as influences. Bausch’sNelken(her carnation-strewn piece exploring extreme and traumatic love) had a significant cameo, lending its floral motif to this Rocha collection. Whether sprouting from the neckline of a gloriously severe tailored black dress, bunched in tulle bouquet handbags, worn as a crystal mesh in harness vests and dresses (made in-house), or embellished on hosiery, suiting or knickers, this flower bloomed across the collection. Rocha mentioned she was interested in its use as a buttonhole ornament in formal menswear, but that meaning was only one dimension here.Other clear-cut elements were the knitwear ballet wrap cardigans and woolen coats from which arching sections had been sliced away. Hugged around the body and worn over tutus—as if the models were dancers mid-rehearsal nipping out for a stage door assignation—these coats incongruously resembled formal tailcoats. A tutu was elsewhere incorporated into a negligée to emphasize an ambiguity between the private and the performative.The curtain slowly rose beyond this rehearsal stage, presenting us with a diverse cast of carnation-garlanded characters. One couple—he in white shorts and vest, she in a beautiful mint sheath dress—were seemingly pressed and preserved within those garments by an over layer of opaque tulle below which were sandwiched more fabric carnations. A black silk satin dress featured a full skirt that had been pulled open at the front by the gesture of Rocha’s design to reveal the wearer’s underwear (also carnation embellished).The collection featured two images by Genieve Figgis, an artist who disturbingly recasts canonical paintings in artworks that seem as muchdommageas homage. These transmitted a sense of chaos and turmoil lurking beneath the human surfaces. Menswear looks included ruffled, exaggeratedly pocketed technical silhouettes in lush duchesse silk.
Ballet slippers with driving shoe soles, a fresh round of Rocha embellished Crocs, and some high shine duck handbags were amongst the accessories. We witnessed the premier of Rocha branded indigo denim, which came barely washed, white-stitched, and cut into full workwear shapes and harnessed to carnation metal and crystal botanical embellishments. A triple-bill of enormously bowed, lushly cut silk dresses and coats at the end seemed almost profligately lavish and lush pieces of human packaging.By contrast, the overwhelmingly narrow span of narrow body shapes in this show’s casting—which is unfortunately still common in London and across the global calendar of shows—was unwittingly emphasized by the sheer range of Rocha’s design spectrum. These were garments so multidimensional and heavy with meaning that the lack of variety in form and physique of those who wore them stood out. “What you project isn't always your reality,” Rocha had mused on an unrelated topic during our preview. Fashion’s enduring insistence on projecting such an unrepresentative reality is an injustice that has long worn thin, but which inexplicably never seems to wear out. That caveat notwithstanding, this Rocha collection demanded only one verdict: beautiful.
15 September 2024
A finely designed duet between the specters of sex and death, this spookily stimulating Simone Rocha collection played what we desire (but can’t automatically possess) against what we’d powerfully prefer to avoid (but will inevitably all end up getting). It was also, she explained, the last part of a three show cycle. Last season’s London collection was titledThe Dress Rehearsalbecause it was conceived alongside and creatively prefaced (through the placement of roses within the garments) her couture collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier. That acclaimed just-passed Paris centerpiece was calledThe Procession, to mark her creative union. And this finale was named The Wake. It was the end of the affair.We gathered in the 12th century St. Bartholomew’s Church, hung heavy with incense and quite probably ghosts, and a venue where we had previously seen spring 2022. When Rocha was researching Gaultier’s archive—which she noted with almost ghoulish relish is stored in boxes termed ‘coffins’—she was invited to view the mourning dress of Queen Victoria in the British royal archive at Hampton Court palace. Victoria famously wore black every day after her husband Prince Albert’s death in 1861 until she joined him 40 years later. Said Rocha: “It was really wild. I’d be in Hampton Court looking at these pieces that were all about security on the body and mourning as a front and form of protection, and then I’d be in Paris looking in Gaultier’s coffins at these super promiscuous perverse pieces.” What united them, she realized, was boning.Corsetry thus ran through this third collection. Its delicate superstructure embraced the abdomen within tie-detail nylon parkas and rompers. Its contours defined the darting in little sheer jackets worn north of pantaloons, some of the many womenswear looks in which Rocha worked to place the models’ breasts on twin metal-beaded podiums shaped perhaps after lips. “There’s the perversity of being adorned, and cupped, in these organza corsets: it’s really stimulating on,” said Rocha. She countered this emphasis with faux-fur hip-emplacements that were accented by shoes, earpieces, and the hems of translucent trapeze dresses worn over more ballooning pantaloons, or the furry buckles that swung from the back of sheer pencil skirts. In menswear, this attention was transferred to the shoulder where twin shooting patches in more faux fur or glass beading stretched from scapula to pectorals.
There were many more characters in Rocha’s congregation. Polo shirts and closed-forearm fine-knits disintegrated into banks of tulle or more corsetry, sometimes sewn with metallic flowers. The models wore eyeleted and strapped thick soled oxfords or adorned Crocs, some in a short gumboot style. A long black dress in sections of fine jersey was peppered with lines of gleaming eyelets, while a red lurex-shot knit pencil skirt was topped with a matching knit hoodie with more beading at the ears.More apparently conventional dresses in crushed golden velvet, pale pink brocade, and bow-bedecked chocolate taffeta exhibited a twisted primness: prim-iscuous. The fabrics were pressed to seem recently disinterred after long slumber, perhaps in a coffin. One dress was embellished with, and many bags were shaped after, a shaggy, warped-headed black or brown dog with startling red beaded eyes that Rocha modeled after the Church Grim, a spectral canine once believed to be our final companion on the road to oblivion. Tonight Rocha gave us a gorgeous, deathly, lascivious send-off to remember. It was just as Queen Victoria once described “too great intimacy with artists”: both “very seductive, and a little dangerous.”
17 February 2024
Simone Rocha’s co-ed summer show, named The Dress Rehearsal, was held at the English National Ballet HQ, a long trek out to the east of London in a newly-built development zone of high-rises. She didn’t use the black-draped theater space for a dance-related entertainment, though; save for a couple of pairs of ballet flats at the end, her shoes were chunky platforms or heavy Crocs, and her 51 models filed around four sides of sides of a rectangle in a conventional show manner.A theme of roses—maybe an idea of bouquets thrown to ballerinas, maybe not—was played out at first in 3-D whorls of fabric. Then followed real, long-stemmed pale pink roses, stuffed inside sheer garments. There was a pink satin mini-dress that looked almost like an entire rose-bud in itself.As the sequence drew on, birthday or wedding cakes took over from roses. Swagged effects imitating old-fashioned icing sugar were prettily rendered across bouncy crinolines, and in one case, running across the entirety of a men’s marching shirt and shorts combo.Slightly strange and rather practical by turns (see the taffeta tracksuits), the collection had all of the hallmarks of a winning Simone Rocha proposition. It would’ve been nice to dive into it more with her, but the long drive to get to the next show had to begin.
18 September 2023
Lughnasadh (or Lughnasa) is the Irish harvest festival that goes back to pagan times, and tangentially about which Brian Friel wrote a great play. Before Christianity’s arrival and ever since, but differently, it has acted as a counterpoint to Beltane: a moment to offer thanks for summer’s bounty, and a moment for communities to commingle. This evening on the blood red carpet of Westminster’s cavernous Central Methodist Hall, Simone Rocha used Lughnasadh as a vehicle for a forward expansion of her design language that last season’sadditionof menswear to her catalog has catalyzed.“I started looking into the rituals of relationships, because I wanted to continue to show women and men together: how they correspond,” said Rocha before the show. That correspondence, or dialogue, has already been heard at retail. She said of her menswear: “we have men buying it, we have women buying it, and that's been really natural.”The models walked around the first level circle of the hall before carefully descending the ornate central staircase to skirt the rows of those seated below. On stage a group of musicians conjured a brooding, sometimes sinister, and very Celtic sounding composition. Rocha’s coming together for harvest, to reap what had earlier been sown, started with a three part sunrise of all-gold womenswear looks in cloque whose surface was puckered like a heap of matured wheat-seed. These were in typically bounteous silhouettes, full in arm and skirt. Spaced around them were darker looks including one menswear ensemble consistent with a classically cut black car coat—but in cloque—over a nappa pant (a four-seasons-past foray apart, this collection also contained Rocha’s sole leather offerings, she said). Perry Ogden of Pony Kids renown—another work of art exploring Irish rituals and living—wore a fine black double breasted top coat in Linton tweed cut with lurex.As the looks unfolded and the tempo of the soundtrack gathered melodic urgency, you began to imagine the venue’s founding fathers feeling aflutter at the increasingly wanton, albeit very poetic, overtones within this collection. The red ribbons that fell from the hair, garments, and sometimes eyes of certain models were meant to represent blood traditionally daubed on children’s faces to ward off ill spirits and bad luck.
The (highly flammable) raffia stuffed into and supporting a series of intricately felt-embroidered, mostly womenswear lace gowns—rural crinolines—spoke of hay bales productively disordered. These carried a richly contradictory tension between the ostensible primness of silhouette and the tumbled suggestion of their fabrication. Women’s slip dresses and underpinnings, and a taut bungee tank top for men served to emphasize the bodies within. Two final all-raffia dresses were totemic. “It’s lust and love and that idea of ritual,” offered Rocha.
18 February 2023
Simone Rocha garnered the first standing ovation that has likely ever been witnessed under the awe-inspiring roof of the Old Bailey, Britain’s seat of criminal trials, the London landmark whose dome is topped with the powerful statue of the blindfolded female personification of Justice, holding her scales.Her verdict came in after a show that seemed filtered through raw energy. It was the same authentic Simone Rocha all right, but with a different accent on utility and fragility. “This collection was very much a reaction to the last few years. It was very much harnessing an emotion that felt like this kind of powerful, feminine statement.”Her harnessing literally went into the parachute tapes threaded through dresses and big, bubble-bomber jackets. She demonstrated how the tapes can function to change the shapes of garments—making something long or short, or giving it a different volume, according to mood. There were lots and lots of airy, pale white-beige-pink layers of tulle, what looked like a pink wallpaper print of flower-wreaths contrasted with a punkier strand of army green, tough aviator pants, and deconstructed corsets.And then, there were veils. Rocha has used veils powerfully before, more in contexts that have hinted at weddings and christenings—echoes of her upbringing in Catholic Ireland. Now, they were flounced, tiered constructs covering the heads and shoulders of women and men. There was a strange coincidence of fate in that. Considering what to do as she was absorbing news of the death of the Queen, Rocha was afraid that the audience might take the reference as a last-minute reaction; but in fact they were part of her own creative origin story; part of her instinct for going back to reconnect herself with the forces she’d been channeling as a student—a rebel girl beginning to grapple with her attraction to history.“There’s definitely pieces within the collection that I think people will feel potentially a response to the current situation. Because my original inspiration, back at Central Saint Martins, was this old tradition of the people of the Aran Isles, where women would dye their petticoats red and wear them on their heads in a funeral procession. I almost took them out at one point. It was touch and go. Then I thought no; because to me they represent this idea of ceremony, but also the vulnerability of it.
”She’d also recalled them because she was starting with menswear—throwing the veil over the head of a boy was an early gesture in her process. “I wanted to work into this beautiful masculinity, and really think about the juxtaposition to everything I've done within the last decade with women, and see how that world plays out in the crossover between the two.”The dynamic had men wearing fragments of petticoats, styled with utility pieces and black tailoring. As Rocha found, creative ideas can’t be contained; she let a sense of the toughness flow over into her womenswear. With great, and emotional, effect. That’s what brought the audience to its feet. “I think clothes are sometimes an escape and a release,” Rocha reflected. “ And then I think I think they’re the reality. What can they be in that reality? For me, it was about making something protective, and healing, and an urgent sense of wanting to go forward.”
19 September 2022
Spellbound by the Irish legend of the Children of Lir, Simone Rocha invited her audience to watch her fall collection emerge out of the atmospheric gloom of a medieval hall in London’s Inns of Court. There’s always some sort of dark tension running beneath the surfaces of the ostensibly pretty layers of her clothes. This time, as she related backstage, it arose from the traditional horror story of the four daughters and sons of an Irish king who were turned into swans by a jealous stepmother. “It’s a really old fable that everyone in Ireland knows,” said Rocha. “The children become swans for nine hundred years, across three different lakes. And when they come back to human form, they pass away. I began loosely basing my narrative on that.”Knowing the backstory, you could perhaps begin to detect the abstracted shapes of wings and feathers coming through the white flounces embedded in coats and take a visual hint from the crinolined buoyancy of skirts. Knitted balaclavas with crystal embroidery around the faces—cutely odd—might on second glance seem to take on the look of half human, half bird-head. A more direct clue, if you needed it, was in the embroidery of two pairs of swans on a semi-sheer tabard. There were white swans, black swans, cygnets in mini-crinis and knitted knickers; both girls and boys. The Children of Lir were, after all, royal: these swans were duly decorated with jewels, studded with pearls, crystals and ruby droplets.Rocha wasn’t really sticking to the letter of the legend. The truth is that she’s created her own language in design: her biker jackets, voluminous coats, big skirts, transparent voile lace-trimmed dresses layered over other dresses. The most stunning turn in the collection—something quite new and satisfyingly strange—came when she cut out the mid-section of a midnight-blue velvet dress, replacing it with a sheer panel with a view to the torso. It was beautiful. When the theme of the collection is forgotten, a daring design coup like that will magnetize Simone Rocha customers of its own accord.
20 February 2022
Simone Rocha gathered us at the medieval church of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London to attend a processional show spun from the rituals and reality of bringing a baby into into the world. New life, new beginnings, tenderness—it seemed like a touching metaphor for the reunion of people at physical shows in London for the first time since February 2020.Out of the darkness of the ancient setting came Rocha’s women, dressed in layers of white broderie anglaise, lace and tulle. Their shoulders were swathed in christening shawls, their voluminous skirts trailed satin ribbons and their heads were crowned with pearls. “A lot of this obviously came from a very maternal place,” said Rocha. She has recently given birth to her second daughter, Noah Roses, a sister for five-year old Valentine, who sat in one of the front pews between her maternal grandparents Odette and John and delighted in every split second of her mother’s show.The sense of occasion motivated Rocha to concentrate a super-sensual sensory overload of detail into her clothes. “I wanted there to be a lot of texture, because it’s an in-person show, and everyone will be quite close to the garments for the first time,” she explained at a preview in her studio. “I was looking a lot into the way children interpret and wear clothes, but then also birth, the ceremony of christening and communion gowns. And baby pointelle knits, the ribbon threaded through the eyelets. And mohair baby cardigans. And Swaddling. And…”—she laughed—“at the out-of-control body dislocation that going through the whole process causes…”Among the post-natally inspired details were nursing bras—some of them inset with jewels—and the idea of bedclothes and nighties becoming fused. “So there's kind of a funny, deranged negligee night-time sort of spooky, deranged insomnia theme running through, too,” said Rocha. Every new mother will relate to what she’s talking about. It might be the first time that post-natal sleep-deprivation and the demands of night feeds have been the inspiration behind a collection.Rocha ended up making lovely coats out of fabrics that looked like antique eiderdowns, one in lavender, another in rose-bud strewn brocade. Gigantic white cotton collars with scalloped edges seemed like bedlinen and ecclesiastical altar-cloths or surplices all at the same time. “I also made a lot of dresses which open at the front and back, which you do need when you’re nursing,” she remarked.
“I wanted to support the breasts with corseting, and to release the hips.”The red and black vinyl jackets and laced-up boots represented something darker about giving birth. Among the baby-proportioned tutus were a couple of red geometric bags “shaped like drips of blood.”In all, Simone Rocha didn’t miss a beat during lockdown. In the long-awaited event her “come-back” collection was superbly herself—and maybe even more so, if that’s possible. It certainly appeared that way to a fashion audience that had been sensorily and visually denied the euphoric pleasure of seeing clothes before our naked eyes. Everyone was smiling as they emerged, blinking, out of church into the autumn sunshine.
20 September 2021
A troupe of Simone Rocha biker ballerinas and rebellious schoolgirls were stomping through the parish church of St. John’s Hyde Park last weekend. The location was one more in the series of venues with an historical aura about them that she loves to treat her audience to. There was no audience this time, of course, just a few crew members and Rocha’s cinematographer partner Eoin McLoughlin, there to film it. But nevertheless, the frisson traveled through the screen.It was both tough and poignantly pretty, in the way only Rocha can put across. She’d called the collection Winter Roses, as she explained earlier, Zooming from her studio in East London. “Fragile rebels. It’s about being very protective and hiding the fragility—then having a flower creeping through the collection. Flowers that then kind of become the dresses. I love that visceral feeling you get from shows, and I’m devastated people won’t see it in person,” she admitted. “But it made me want to make things that are even more tactile.”Her narrative spanned black leather biker jackets, curved into the waist and sprouting frills from the shoulders of Edwardian balloon sleeves; jackets and dresses with clusters of 3-d satin roses growing across them; and exploding asymmetries of layered sugar pink tulle. A garland of white-and-ivory flowers poured in a sideways cascade over a pink net ballet skirt, breathtakingly. Wound into all was her jewelry: faux natural pearls hand-painted with roses; white porcelain cameo earrings.“Well,” she shrugged ruefully, “the only thing you’re allowed to do in all this is work. All you do is work.” She’s had a pretty busy pandemic year of it, to put it mildly. She’s produced two collections, designed her extensive collaboration with H&M, and has a lockdown baby on the way. Meanwhile, there’s been co-homeschooling for her five year old, Valentine. “Maybe that’s why this show took a school-like, educational turn,” she laughed. “With all these deconstructed pleated pinafores and white shirts that started to come into it.”Whatever else has been going on, the pandemic has certainly been no block to Rocha’s creativity and her ability to infuse emotion into her presentations. Applause is one thing that’s missing from all these digital experiences. So let’s hear it for Simone Rocha now—this was lovely.
23 February 2021
Well, it was lovely to see Simone Rocha in person and her group of 10 models, with everyone standing at least two meters apart within the cavernous white walls of the Hauser & Wirth gallery today. You had your temperature checked as you went in, signed a form, and entered your email and phone number, as per U.K. COVID-19 regulations.As far as writers are concerned, Zoom calls are good for enriching conversations with designers, but being able to see their clothes with our own eyes is a retina rush that has become all the more intense for its rarity. “I’m not going to lie: I’ll be the first to say I love runway shows,” Rocha had said ruefully earlier. “Now that the pace of shows has been stripped away, I wanted to find a space to represent that. It’s important to me to find a way to physically share the collection, just for the silhouette, texture, and weight of it. Clothes are made of cloth, and emotions, and they come to life on a body.”And so, for just a few minutes, we were able to savor the rounded volumes, the contrasts between gilded brocades and plain canvas, the scalloped-edge cottons, and the gauzy layers.“Sobering and exploding, pragmatic and foreboding,” were key words Rocha said she’d scribbled in her notebook at the start of it. She’d also pulled up Richard Prince’s eroticBettie Klineimages and paintings of Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II, with her celebrated jewel-bedecked bosom on display.Close up, the layers held little messages: on tulle veiling, patterns of castles; in the broderie anglaise, SR monograms. “Castles in faraway places,” she laughed. “I think that’s the escapism we’re all craving.” And everywhere, there were the pearls which are now her signature, as headdresses, breast outliners, and scaled up in 3D to form a bag.The most outstanding piece? It’s the one that carries just as strongly in the look book as in real life: a cream canvas dress with a scoop neckline, curved hips, seamed bodice, and a bow in the back. “Ah, that one!” Rocha concurred, “That’s my favorite.”
19 September 2020
“Procession, baptism; birth, life, and loss,” began Simone Rocha. “It’s about the Aran Islands, the life there, and J.M. Synge’s play about it,Riders to the Sea.” Everyone will recognize the cream wool Aran pattern that was a centerpiece of Rocha’s fall collection—the Irish stitch is world-famous, even though it originates from a tiny sprinkle of islands off Connemara on the country’s west coast. “It’s the color of the unbleached wool from the sheep there,” Rocha explained. In olden days, people on the remote, rugged islands lived only on sheep and the proceeds of battling with the sea—Synge’s drama is about the tragedy and the resilience of a woman who has lost her husband and sons to drowning.To run your eyes over Rocha’s show was to see a beautiful tonal sequence of white cotton, blanket-y off-white wool, pieces of Aran knitting, and fluid oyster satin. “So here are fisherman’s bags, nets, pearls, and the birthing dresses with fat babies on them,” she said. Allusions lead naturally from one thing to another and become products in Rocha’s head. Her Alice bands acquired dripping pearly extensions; her wildly successful line of earrings turned into a haul of broken seashells and “foggy” chandeliers.But then, something darker began to flow in. There’s always a shadow side lurking in the familiar folds and layers of Rocha’s narratives. Women in mourning, church rituals, priests, legends, and the Virgin Mary all became wound into this one. Rocha didn’t receive a religious upbringing from her parents at home in Dublin. “So I never made my first Communion, so I never got to dress up in the white frocks, though all the girls around me at school did. Maybe that’s why I’m obsessed, making up for it,” she said with a laugh, ruffling the skirt of the white smock she was wearing. “Of course, you can’t look at Ireland and not be influenced a little bit by Catholicism.”The cycle of life seen through the experiences of women—always at the root of Rocha’s consciousness—was backed up too by her looking at the work of Irish artist Dorothy Cross. An image of her statue of the Madonna, draped in what seemed to be a veil with a train (it’s actually a sinister cowhide), was part of Rocha’s inspiration. There were beautiful dense Chantilly lace bridal veils at the culmination of the show, but not before the bride of Christ had manifested herself in dresses of pale tulle and celestial blue through to deep blue satin and vibrant cloque roses.
“It kind of went a bit papal here,” Rocha giggled, indicating the bishop sleeves and ceremonial red satin wrap involved in a coat. “And then here’s St. Malachy, the patron saint of Ireland, who made prophecies.” His name was printed in orange church lettering on deep purple backgrounds.Well, you can get away with not knowing any of this. Rocha’s is a continuity collection—a safe haven for romanticists and practical women of all ages. There was a new appeal in the sinuous oyster-colored satin dresses and plenty of roses somewhere along the way. Forthcoming occasions were fully catered to.But what did St. Malachy say? His “Prophecies of the Popes” predicts that during the time of Pope Francis (i.e., he who is in charge today) the end of the world will come. Ah. Well, it certainly feels a bit like things are going that way. But carpe diem! Probably there’s still time to fit in some dressing up.
16 February 2020