An intimate affair: Simone Rocha strips back
For spring/summer 2027, Simone Rocha purified her romantic language to explore intimacy, vulnerability and beauty where you least expect it. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
After her show, Simone Rocha casually reeled off the feelings that went into her collection: “Intimate, personal, authentic, effortless. No fuss. Morning, on their way to the train.” Unless they’d been out all night, it was rather a glamorous commute, but the feelings were palpable, nonetheless. When Rocha pushes the intimacy button, she pushes it extremely well. Presented in the Old Bailey – its illuminated opulence the perfect backdrop for Rocha’s crystal-clear sense of decoration – her spring/summer 2027 collection played with the dressed versus the undressed.
“Honestly, I was kind of looking for the less obvious. I didn’t want to get too bogged down in narrative,” Rocha said. “It’s the first show I’ve done in a while that’s been women’s only and stripped back, so I really wanted to get to the purity and beauty. But then, I didn’t want the beauty to be too heightened, so we wanted it to feel a little bit undone and underpin it with intimate, real garments. It was that attitude and feeling of these different facets of femininity.” Rocha expressed it in parkas worn over evening dresses, windbreakers adorned with roses, and dresses suspended between the glamorous and the almost sporty.
She cited as inspiration the unbelievable story of how, in 1990, Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ was rediscovered in the dining room of a residence in Dublin, where it had long been thought a copy. “I thought, what’s the most beautiful thing in the most unobvious place? I wanted to put that into each garment, whether it was peeling back the necks of the suits, or whether the neckline framed the body in a certain way or came up and framed the face, giving a sense of play and proportion and all these different facets of a woman in her everyday.”
It was a strong collection for Rocha, composed of feminine expressions from the girly to the ladylike and all the manifestations of power in between. “Sometimes I can be really layered and put clothes on top of clothes, so it becomes a really protective thing. I wanted it to be slightly more vulnerable: exposing the undergarments or exposing a tailored trouser beneath a dress,” she said. “I wanted there to be an intimacy.”
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