Simone Rocha: ‘With every show I’m telling a story’
De Beauvoir Town in Hackney is known for many things, but bucolic views is not one of them. Yet look out of Simone Rocha’s office window and all you see is
leaves and water. Somehow she’s found a rare spot along this busy stretch of the
Regent’s Canal where a climbing vine has smothered all four storeys of the
building opposite. So in addition to her vast dark desk, the photos of work by
Nobuyoshi Araki, Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois and the wall of art books,
Rocha’s office is full of dappled light off the canal and framed with a burst of
vivid green. “It’s a blessing,” she says , gazing up at the wall of leaves. “It
does make this place feel more natural.”
It also makes it feel like the perfect location for Rocha’s studio. A place where unsettling things are made. From her graduate collection in 2010 onwards,
Rocha’s designs have riffed on traditional ideas of femininity, but always with
edge or unease. Girly motifs – pearls, flowers, tulle – are worked jarringly
with Perspex or embroidered plastic. Macramé bondage straps decorate pretty
organza dresses. Ravaged hairstyles sit atop restrictive, embroidered Victorian
dresses. For spring/summer 2018, her voluminous dresses were decorated with
paper dolls and blood-red drop crystals.
Nature has played a role in her collections, too, but never as somewhere nice to have a picnic. Nature is the workplace of the African agricultural workers
shot by photographer Jackie Nickerson which influenced Rocha’s spring/summer
2017 collection, resulting in Lucite-heeled wellingtons and rubber lace gloves.
Its hedges are where Rocha kissed and smoked as a “wild, bold” teenager in rural
Dublin, a reference offered for her spring/summer 2013 collection of neon
daisies and gold tweed. Unbelievable leaves wrapped round a modern building,
like those outside her office window, seem like something she could have dreamed
up for herself.“My whole ethos is the idea of femininity and how that’s
integrated into women’s lives, how it makes them feel,” she explains, looking
rather small and younger than her 31 years behind her huge desk – though she
speaks with remarkable confidence. “With every show you’re telling a story and
you want to tell one that women connect with. Even if it’s a story about how men
find women hot, women are still at the centre of that.”
Her work has certainly struck a chord. Fashion industry recognition was instant. She showed her Central Saint Martins graduation collection at Fashion
East in 2010, a prestigious showcase for young designers. Lulu Kennedy, director
of Fashion East, says that she fell in love with Rocha’s MA collection.
“Simone’s taste levels, references and materials were refined and she absolutely
knew her own mind – you could see right away she had what it takes to go all the
way.” A year after, she was accepted for Topshop’s New Gen sponsorship scheme.
She was a finalist for the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize in 2013 and has now
won three British Fashion Awards, moving from the Emerging Talent award in 2014
to British Womenswear Designer in 2016. Everyone from Rihanna to Gillian
Anderson has worn her clothes.
The trick, she explains in her friendly but firm way, is to find the intimate and expose it. “As a woman designing for women it’s natural to make my designs
personal. So when I had a baby it really influenced the collection, because I
felt terrible. I couldn’t help but be influenced. I make better work if I let my
guard down and put myself into it. ”Baby Valentine Ming McLoughlin – whose
father is cinematographer Eoin McLoughlin – is now nearly two. “Motherhood is
like an out-of-body experience,” says Rocha. “The hardest thing is the lack of
sleep. Though being pregnant was terrible, too,” she adds, laughing at the
awfulness of the memory. “If anyone asks me how a collection’s going, I say:
‘Well, at least I’m not pregnant.’”
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