“My father has always told me: 'Work hard, but stop when it stops making you happy.'” Simone Rocha (Dublin, 37 years old) could have been another nepobaby if it weren't for the fact that his talent has left no room for criticism for more than a decade. Daughter of Hong Kong designer John Rocha, one of the oldest on the British scene, the Irish woman spent her afternoons after school playing with what was in her studio. “I guess she was somehow destined for this,” she says. After going through the legendary London school Central Saint Martins, she made her debut in 2010, at the age of 24, with a show presented at the Tate Modern (for that, being the daughter of her father did help) which was an instant success.
The reviews were so good that that same year she won the award for best emerging designer at the British Fashion Awards. In London, accustomed to everything in fashion, they had not seen anything like it: garments in which Victorian Gothic dialogues with traditional Chinese clothing, made of technical fabrics and with dozens of small details, always bows or small flowers: “I always like I have considered design as a language. I started creating garments based on my history, as an Irish person from an Asian family who moved to London. “I have grown up in a city full of traditions and I live in one where the modern and the traditional coexist,” she explains. Rocha hardly uses moodboards of inspiration, you already have all your references, that is, your own language, in your head. Also, for the same reason, a clientele that wears what he designs almost from top to bottom, as if it were a uniform, something that few designers can boast of. “I don't have a specific profile, I suppose that whoever buys my clothes is because they want to express something with them and because they feel comfortable with my style. It is clothing that has nothing to do with trends or time, that you can wear now or in the future. Many buy it thinking about that, but there is no prototype,” she says. In fact, Rocha's last show, held at St. Bartholomew's Church in London last February, was inspired by Queen Victoria's mourning clothing, “pieces that mean, pieces that are preserved,” the show notes narrated. .
It is the first time, however, that Rocha has undertaken to create pieces that are truly preserved, that is, haute couture, in the most exclusive market niche of this sector, in which each unique design is It is created by hand in a Parisian workshop (so say the rules of the Chamber of Trade Unions, the French body that regulates what is and what is not haute couture) and usually costs four figures. “It has been like living a dream. Every idea he proposed came to fruition. “Everyone as a team was looking for a way to manually create things that seemed impossible,” explains the Irishwoman about Jean Paul Gaultier's master seamstresses, many of them with more than 20 years of career behind them in that same period. atelier. When the designer retired, just before the pandemic, the Puig group, owner of the brand, decided to keep the brand alive by inviting a different designer every six months to present a haute couture collection. Rocha is the sixth to accept the challenge. Gaultier chooses them personally, but gives them so much freedom that he doesn't see the collection until the day of the show, like the rest of the world. “I do it out of respect,” the Frenchman has declared on several occasions.
“Of course I was a fan of Gaultier, like all the designers of my generation,” says Simone Rocha, “I have always liked his way of mixing the aesthetics of the street with that of luxury, but above all I like his vision of liberation from the feminine, always respecting differences.” It was Gaultier who, in 1990, designed a corset for the tour Blonde Ambition, of Madonna, which is already popular culture history. That corset, perhaps the garment most associated with female oppression, subverted its connotations and became an element of liberation and reappropriation of the body. The Irish woman has used it as a starting point to design her collection: “I am interested in opposites. Exploring the mix of the ethereal with the very armed,” she says. Chiffon and crinolines, lace and metallic whales, transparencies and volumes; Rocha's collection is, in reality, an exploration of what the clothed female body means, “from the chest, the hips, the waist… How the clothes themselves give them a certain shape and how they are naturally,” she says. In an industry that is once again showing thin and canonical bodies, she is one of the few that introduces models of all generations and sizes into her presentations. “For me it is something natural. It's reality. It wouldn't make sense that what I do couldn't be worn by any woman,” she says.
Unlike many male designers, Rocha confesses that she does not have muses and does not design with specific women in mind. This foray into haute couture has allowed her to put into practice something she had never done before, garments with a handmade complication that makes them unique, almost works of art, but in her daily life, and despite the fact that the Irish woman designs Thinking about permanence, their work is as visually impressive as it is functional: cotton, zippers, pockets (that exception still exists today in women's clothing) and a silhouette that can be scaled to any size. In “her language”, as she likes to call her creative process, there is room for those very recognizable Victorian-looking dresses, but also for a whole series of small accessories that make her project not just that of a fashion brand. traditional luxury: Crocs clogs studded with rhinestones, earrings, brooches or hair accessories in the shape of pearls, flowers or bows that almost always end up going viral on social networks. “I started a long time ago introducing these elements related to the feminine in my work to test how they worked in different contexts. In the end they have become one of my hallmarks,” she explains.
Now that the umpteenth trend on everyone's lips, called coquette, vindicates these and other elements associated with kitsch (with and without irony), the designer seems to have found a formula for success: “Although I don't know if the fact that all this is becoming fashionable is good or bad. On the one hand, I guess it's good for me; On the other hand, I prefer to continue doing things my way,” she says. So much like her that in a world dominated by Kering and LVMH, the two big holdings that monopolize the majority of luxury fashion brands, Simone Rocha has been independent for 15 years and does not seem to want to stop being so. She has four physical stores spread across London, New York, Hong Kong and Taipei, that is, in her four main markets, and a workshop of just over 50 people in east London. “And for now we are fine like this. It already seems incredible to me that we have come this far and have survived. I don't think about the future, I only think about the collection that will come next, how to materialize it and how to present it. That already seems like enough of a challenge to me.”
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