Simone Rocha: Revelations of the Everyday

For Spring/Summer 2027, Simone Rocha looked beyond her familiar codes, colliding Caravaggio, fetishism, workwear and exposed flesh in pursuit of something simply beautiful

Have you heard the one about the Caravaggio in a Dublin dining room? No, it’s not a very special edition of the Antiques Roadshow, but rather the remarkable discovery of the Baroque masterpiece The Taking of Christ, painted in 1603, on the wall of a Dublin Jesuit mess hall in 1990. Everyone assumed it was a copy, someone fudged the records in 18th-century Rome, and doubtless 30-odd years ago a tranche of people were railing against their ancestors’ generosity in donating the painting back in the Thirties. It’s a great story. Suffice it to say, even if Simone Rocha pointedly didn’t want to connect her Spring/Summer 2027 collection to a narrative, in a stereotypically Irish fashion, she couldn’t help but wind up spinning a yarn. At least to explain its thought processes, its mashings-up and messings-about with what we should wear, and where.

Rocha took that seemingly tall tale as a great excuse for colliding grand designs with the intimate. Her version of intimates is, well, a bit middle-aged mum, a bashful wink-wink nudge-nudge avoidance of words like lingerie, or god forbid plain and simple underwear. “Fetishistic,” was Rocha’s unfettered verbiage for a collection that had more flesh than any of her shows before, outfits abbreviated to full-bottomed, ‘pneumatic’ padded knickers in satin or leather, or bra straps dangling, integrated into dresses left hanging around the waist. “Feminine form, rather than the male gaze,” she said of that slight striptease. “She owns it.” But Rocha could also recast an otherwise iffy ladylike pair of prim wrist-length leather gloves as an intimate fetish object, given their exceptional closeness to the skin, she said. The grandness, by contrast, did have a sweep of Caravaggio, in papery taffeta dresses that resembled the great gads of drapery flung across his paintings in bold defiance of gravity, and a bunch of rich Lynchian blue velvet numbers swagged at low-slung necks with wreaths of flowers.

“Looking for the less obvious” was a cited aim – and just as no one expected a Caravaggio in their lounge-diner, you didn’t expect these clothes from Rocha. That’s not to say these garments felt alien to her established aesthetic, but they were wilfully shorn of many of her signifiers – the stuff that, for instance, singles out her new Adidas Originals collection that just dropped. Ruffles, ribbons, pearls, frilly bits, the outwardly feminine and girly, things that others would call romantic, a word Rocha abhors. She eschewed them all in favour of some things more grandiose, and some contradictory too, like stuffing the necklines of a chewed-up-looking, drab brown wool suit or blood-red sports-style jacket with posies of handmade roses like a bridesmaid run amok. They even clambered out of the deep scoop lapels of a black leather coat, femininity inescapable. Of course, they’re also romantic offerings, passed between those in love. Which was Rocha’s simple qualifier for her decision-making: “Unless I love it, it’s not going in.”

Those – leisure centre track jackets, humble suits, leathers – also felt like part of her revelations of the everyday. Otherwise hardy cotton workman’s jackets were wrapped in embroidered tulle or embellished with dangling jet beads like some Victorian keepsake. Hoodies, meanwhile, spoke not of shopping centre miscreants, but the Renaissance, clustered in masses that flowed like a funeral pyre or hanging pure in taffeta like wimples, although Rocha desperately wanted to avoid the religious connotations. Actually, her models looked anything but saintly, mealy-mouthed, marched arms crossed in a defensive gesture of defiance. They seemed up for a fight. Maybe they weren’t too far from a precinct after all.

Speaking of the female versus the male gaze, these clothes also, of course, wilfully obscured the body, in a way that felt like some sort of reassuring succour versus the everything-out-there, all-too-exposed flesh we see persistently framed through every nook and cranny of popular culture. Caravaggio loved a nude, but there is a difference between nude and merely naked. Rocha’s female understanding – and this show, for the first time in a long while, showcased purely her womenswear (her men’s was shown in Florence in June) – felt somewhat like bodily reassurance. Of course there’s all kinds of symbolism you can read into an opening rosebud perched on your pubis – but a face, and you’re thinking about the mind inside. And in fact, you thought about the women who would inhabit these garments, and in turn the lives they would inhabit.

It’s something you kind of wish more designers asked themselves. “I just want to do beautiful things,” she added. Then, more stridently, “fucking great clothes.”