Love, Lust and Ritual: Photographs of Simone Rocha’s Intoxicating New Assortment

On the Saturday night of London Vogue Week, within the sombre, baroque house of Central Corridor Westminster, Simone Rocha offered her Autumn/Winter 2023 assortment. The Irish designer is lauded for her sense of theatricality and spectacle – friends at her reveals gown opulently for the event, usually head-to-toe in Simone Rocha – and this season was no totally different, with friends seated throughout two ranges of the red-carpeted corridor beneath a big dome; a sea of waxen pearls, shimmering sequins, delicate lace, bouncy tulle and chintzy florals. The venue, a Methodist church and convention centre beforehand host to suffragette conferences in 1914, was as a substitute utilised by Rocha for its musical qualities; friends have been handled to a haunting efficiency by Irish folks group Lankum, full with a reside set on the towering silver organ flanking the wall behind the band.

Drawing totally on the traditions and rituals of Lughnasadh, the pageant of harvest in Eire, Rocha spoke backstage of an “earthiness” operating by way of the gathering. Alongside her signature, extra glitzy strategy to vogue – this season included crinkly gold ensembles, removable sailor collars fabricated from gems and beads, and saggy lace shirt and trouser combos – Rocha had stuffed dried raffia (which gave the phantasm of straw) into the crevices of attire, implying an overflowing and a simultaneous reference to the land. Certainly one of Rocha’s central references this season was Perry Ogden’s Pony Youngsters, the cult 1999 picture collection capturing Dublin’s Traveller and Settled kids with their ponies – now a uncommon basic in outsider documentary images. 

Ogden modelled within the present, showing in a white shirt and a glowing black high coat (a world away from the informality and grit of the characterful picture collection that made his identify). Elsewhere, fashions held macramé luggage below arm like hay bales, whereas two knotted raffia attire in pale yellow and black recalled the hooped raffia skirts of Simone Leigh’s highly effective sculptures (Leigh was the primary Black lady artist to characterize the USA on the Venice Biennale in 2022, and was dressed by Rocha for the opening). “I used to be considering of the west of Eire and being on the water. It’s actually dry [there],” Rocha mentioned of the present’s inspiration, in reference to the combination of sailor and farmyard motifs on show.

Rocha put actors on her runway this season, most of them Irish – like her – though they have been troublesome to distinguish between run-of-the-mill fashions. Rocha is a connoisseur of artwork and tradition, having curated an exhibition of girls artists in Scotland final yr that blended larger names like Cindy Sherman and Louise Bourgeois with rising stars, and the identical might be mentioned of the designer’s style in movie. This season, the actors within the present have been of cult fame; there was Samantha Morton of Synecdoche, New York (and her daughter Esmé Creed-Miles), Patrick Gibson of The OA, Aisling Franciosi of The Nightingale, Olwen Fouéré of The Northman and extra (alongside big-name fashions like Karen Elson and Lily Cole). 

“Simone narrates her life by way of her work, her relationship with Eire and her roots, motherhood, household, and her tackle the female and the masculine,” says Celestine Cooney, a stylist and a pal of Rocha’s, who attended the present in a robust khaki bomber-and-trouser males’s look from final season. “Sporting her garments makes me really feel like I might command a military on horseback after which attend La Bohème on the Royal Opera Home in the identical outfit that night.” Francesca Hayward, principal dancer with the Royal Ballet – who attended the present in an all-white outfit and has beforehand collaborated with Rocha on a brief movie – says that when she wears the model, she feels “powerfully female, wholly distinctive. I really feel delicate and romantic but in addition very sturdy and fierce and like everybody ought to be frightened of me.” Zola director Janicza Bravo explains that, whereas sporting Simone Rocha, she looks like a John Singer Sargent portray, or “like dessert earlier than dinner”.

Final season, Rocha dabbled in menswear for the primary time, with critics praising her comfortable, delicate strategy to masculinity; there have been bombers cascading with tulle, pearl-encrusted jackets, and bejewelled trench coats, with one male mannequin’s face smeared in glitter and obscured by pale pink swathes of cloth. James Massiah, a south London poet and musician and wearer of the model, believes Rocha is carving out new terrain along with her menswear. “Simone does a fantastic job of subverting norms, [with] the skirts, the frills, the lengthy flowing coats,” he says. “I take nice pleasure in difficult expectations on this regard, and she or he does too.” 

This season, Rocha’s women and men walked by way of Central Corridor Westminster and into the sunshine with tiny pink and white ribbons tied in bows in pink glued beneath their eyes, giving the phantasm of tears and bloodshed. And with the ominous, primal sounds of Lankum’s concertina and uilleann pipes reverberating by way of the corridor, it was troublesome to not really feel emotional. As in her earlier reveals, Rocha proved that vogue is about far more than simply garments; in weaving collectively the disparate threads of artwork, Irish custom, music, and folks – and evenly pushing towards gendered codes of dressing – Rocha created vogue as pure feeling.