SIMONE ROCHA
The fashion star has reimagined modern femininity by deconstructing romantic motifs in her highly personal collections. By Harriet Walker
Simone Rocha greets the news that she is Bazaar ’s Designer of the Year with a smile. ‘I wouldn’t want to repeat the last year in a hurry,’ she laughs. The past 12 months have seen Rocha launch two critically acclaimed collections, open a shop on Mount Street and a space in the newly relocated Dover Street Market, move into a house five minutes from her Hackney studio, and have her daughter, Valentine, who is now just under a year old. ‘I took three weeks’ maternity leave,’ she says. ‘Well, I took Christmas.’
She is radiant despite the many claims on her attention, with a sunniness born of the profound satisfaction she derives from overseeing her six-year-old independent label. Hers has become one of the key shows on the London schedule – essential viewing for the quiet authority with which she sets forth ideas on the catwalk that soon find their way into our wardrobes. Rihanna, Keira Knightley and Alexa Chung are fans; Diane Kruger and Kate Bosworth are regularly seen in her pieces, too. At 30, Rocha (who won Emerging Designer at the 2013 British Fashion Awards) has segued from up-and-coming to part of the establishment without losing her verve or visionary appeal.
For autumn, she overhauled traditional Prince of Wales check tailoring and prim, pie-crust-collared dresses into something deconstructed and grungy: elegant but rebellious as ever, and somehow encompassing all stages of womanhood, from princess dressing to granny chic. ‘My collections always come from a very personal place – the last two, it was being pregnant and then having the kid,’ she says. ‘It’s a very emotional experience. I always want you to feel that in the clothes.’
A tour of Rocha’s studio is enough to convince one of the very real sentiment that goes into these pieces. From this base in east London, she and her mostly female team drape, design, hand-embroider and embellish; her father, the designer John Rocha, supervises fittings; and her mother Odette works on sales and production. ‘So many of the labels that I admire are family-driven,’ she says, referencing Prada and Comme des Garçons.
The walls of her office are tacked with postcards and photos of typical Rocha tropes: a pair of young girls at their first Holy Communion; several painterly florals; works by Louise Bourgeois and Rachel Whiteread; and ruffed and swagged portraits of Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex.
‘Lots of the things I’m attracted to are very classically romantic,’ she says. ‘Flowers, blooms, pearls, pink – but what I love is taking those codes that women naturally relate to and seeing how they can be made modern.’
It is Rocha’s interest in the delicate handling of ‘the feminine’ that has earned her such affection among critics and customers alike; her clothes are at once familiar and fresh, pretty and practical, redolent of the girls we once were and the women we will become.