Irish designer Simone Rocha interprets the ceremonial undertones of roses in her spring/summer 2024 collection and teases a long- anticipated collaboration with a luminary of French fashion.
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December,” wrote the Scottish novelist and playwright JM Barrie in A Window in Thrums. And, as it turns out, God gave us Irish fashion designer Simone Rocha so we might wear roses in December. Once dubbed the “master of wearable fantasy”, Rocha became a fixture on London’s fashion scene in 2010, when her graduate collection was shown at Tate Modern during London Fashion Week. That was followed by an installation at Dover Street Market and, in 2014, Harpers Bazaar’s Young Designer of the Year award.
But what of roses? All that the flowers symbolise – love, passion, time-honoured ideas of romance elegised by Victorian wordsmiths – consistently echoes throughout Rocha’s collections. Take her 2015 Flowers and Cars campaign, on which she collaborated with photographer Jacob Lillis on a series of images of plants sprouting out of various automobiles. A tangle of wild English blooms climbing up the back window of an ageing Volvo, gently occluding light and space, accompanied by sprinkles of milky-white cow parsley laid bare on its hot and glimmering bonnet, this astonishing intermingling of manmade technology and untamed nature seemed to capture to perfection the contemporary sentiment of Simone Rocha’s brand.
In 2021, Rocha landed a collaboration with H&M, an honour previously bestowed on Donatella Versace, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, John Galliano and Stella McCartney. The capsule collection, which featured billowy prairie dresses with signature floral motifs sculpted out of tulle, was perhaps her brand’s first foray into the mainstream, which strengthened her global status as a fashion luminary.
Rocha’s spring/summer 2024 collection, which bears the name Dance Rehearsal, saw roses as a ritualistic symbol of obsession. “It all started with a bouquet,” she says. “We thought it would be interesting to put something so romantic and natural into a technical context. Then we began a scientific exploration of the idea of obsession through clothing. I wanted it to feel coordinated and dressy and take it out of the ornate spaces – which is where I’ve been showing historically – making clothes the decoration of the room.” (And “decoration” here is a term too humble. Each look that walked through the English National Ballet’s sombre rehearsal space was a centrepiece, a work of art and a beacon highlighting Rocha’s creative genius.)
Her opening look is quite literal (it wouldn’t be Rocha if she didn’t make her theme known within the first seconds of the défilé): an obsessively tailored two-piece comprising a cropped puff-sleeved hooded jacket embellished with rose-shaped appliqués. The garment’s menswear counterpart in baby blue appears closer to the show’s finale. Next up – a look as ingenious as Jeremy Scott’s bouquet dress worn by Kaia Gerber and Gigi Hadid at the Moschino spring/summer 2018 show – is a sheer hooded parka with real pink roses hidden beneath the layers of tulle.
“We used fresh roses in the show, so we had to keep replenishing them, which means we had to create a bunch of secret pockets within the garments to switch the flowers,” says Rocha, “It’s quite complex, because for this piece we placed something fragile and natural inside of something technical and functional.” She also repeated this fabrication with a black two-piece later in the show and two sheer gowns with visible boning at the finale. She freezes life in time, almost like a piece of glistening amber does with prehistorical creatures.
Going forward, we see more mind- blowing examples of Rocha’s mastery in textural manipulations, meaning more roses and bows sculpted out of technical fabrics, elaborate bustiers and dresses draped so fine it seems as if they’re liquid, crosses of lace and ruffles (more on that in a minute), together with gowns of brocade and what looks like PVC. The looks progress from subtle to intense – and it transpires Rocha elected wedding anniversaries for the collection’s narrative structure. “The years you mark your wedding anniversary start with paper,” she says, “and then it goes to cotton, leather wool, silver and aluminium – we wanted to translate all these into fabrics.”
And this is only the tip of the iceberg in Rocha’s imaginarium. As we later discover, the collection also carries quasi-religious connotations (or rather, ideas of sacred rituals). Images of the Unfading Rose canon in Russian and Greek iconography and the Miracle of the Roses story in Catholic doctrine (often referenced by painters suc as Karl von Blaas) come to mind. So what inspired her gothic mise-en-scène – an installation of a decaying cottage and a spine-tingling soundtrack?
“I didn’t have a physical mood board,” Rocha explains, “we drew inspiration from William Christenberry’s isolated sculptures [depicting abandoned buildings in his home state of Alabama], the story of the Little Ark, Kilbaha [a mobile “church” used to allow parishioners to practice their faith in the face of oppression and threats of eviction in 19th-century Ireland], of which we built a ghost-like version at the show.”
Equipped with a unique appreciation for the romantic and exquisite, as well as superior craftsmanship, Rocha refashioned historical records of religious oppression and bloodcurdling stories of forsaken cities in the American Bible Belt into a couture fairytale. She used fresh roses as replacements for boning and corsetry in her parkas, almost as a metaphor for the sacred secrecy of worship rituals, at once wedding and wake.
Rocha also breaks the news of her appointment as the next guest creative director for Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture – she will present her collection in January. Gaultier began inviting fashion designers to interpret his archives through couture collections on his retirement in 2020. And, as alumni of the programme such as Julien Dossena, Glenn Martens, Haider Ackermann and Chitose Abe would know, this collaboration won’t be easy. But what else could a union of two masters of wearable fantasy be called, other than a match made in heaven?
As the saying goes, good things come to those who wait, so fashion connoisseurs will need to restrain their impatience. Who knows what Rocha has in store for her admirers? Another Gothic fairy tale? A high-fashion take on Irish mythology? Some enigmatic Catholic canon revamped for the modern age? Whatever it is, it shall be grand.
(Main and Feature Image credit: Simone Rocha)
This article was first published in PrestigeOnline Hong Kong.
