First published by T Magazine on 9 September 2015
It’s been five years since Simone Rocha first showed at London Fashion Week, when she was just a promising Central Saint Martins graduate with a familiar last name. (Her father, John Rocha, had long been on the schedule with his eponymous label, run in partnership with her mother, Odette Gleeson.) But over the last 10 seasons, the younger Rocha has built a brand that has little to do with her family. Her textural, tough-romantic clothes have won her two British Fashion Awards, for Emerging Designer 2013 and New Establishment Designer 2014, and today her pieces are stocked by the likes of Dover Street Market, Colette, Bergdorf Goodman and 10 Corso Como. Finally, this fall, she has opened her first standalone store on London’s Mount Street, alongside Marc Jacobs, Roksanda and Céline.
Inside the store, Rocha has found ways to blend the 19th-century building’s Queen Anne-style architecture with her signature design touches. She has kept the original pillars in the space, for example, but installed her own modern cornicing — a chain of three-dimensional roses that threads around the room. When T arrives for a tour, Rocha appears from a back office, in head-to-toe black, topped by a cloud of dark hair. She is expecting her first child in November, but has three significant tasks to complete first: open the store; present her London Fashion Week show; and move into a new house. “I don’t know how I’ll be at the show. Narcoleptic!” she jokes. “‘Where’s Simone? She’s asleep. She’s hiding under a rail to sleep.’”
The store — which opened quietly in August, but will officially launch during fashion week — is already bringing her enormous satisfaction. Rocha says she has been struck by the contrast between the intensity of creating a show, which will be over in minutes, and the permanence of designing her own space. “I’m super thrilled,” she says. “This is a bricks-and-mortar of my identity and my inspirations and my research, and if anything it makes me feel more creative – whereas after a show you feel totally depleted. It just gives the whole collection a sense of place, and a real home.”
The space, which will evolve season by season to incorporate new installations and artworks, is also a testament to her love of collaboration. The set designer Janina Pedan worked with Rocha to create a white cage that takes pride of place in the middle of the store, and in which clothes are displayed on mannequins in an arrangement that more conventionally would be shown in the window. This is because the front window itself is otherwise occupied, by another collaboration with Pedan: an imposing, abstract sculpture that uses elements from the fall/winter 2015 collection. It’s a stainless steel mesh, blooming with embroidered flowers, which are individually sandwiched in Perspex. “It’s all hand-stitched to try and make a 3D form symbolizing all the different shapes of this season,” she explains.
Nearby, accessories are displayed around two glass boxes, which contain sprawling expanses of honeycomb. “These are sculptures by an artist called Ren Ri,” Rocha says. “I just absolutely loved the organic and the man-made together.” The structures are mesmerizing, offering an unexpected foil to her goat-hair handbags and Mary Jane shoes.
Another important collaborator is Rocha’s father, who has designed a pair of perfect curved marble seats for what she considers “our shoe room, but with no doors”: a light, airy space at the back of the store. Her parents and Louise Wilson, the late Central Saint Martins professor, have been the guiding mentors of her career. “Louise drilled it into me all the time: ‘It’s all about the work.’ And it is! And that’s how you achieve things,” she says. “There’s been some people in my life that really were very driven, like my family and like Louise, and that gave me a lot of determination. They’ve always been like, ‘It’s all about your identity, and who you are, and what you want to say.’”
At 28, Rocha is young to open in Mayfair, but she feels she is ready. “I do a lot of installations, and I have a lot of spaces with Dover Street Market, so I started working with space and environment,” she says. “I just thought, ‘This would be a wonderful time to open my store if I could do it, and it would really cement what I want to say.’”
During London Fashion Week, Rocha says she will show something “a bit more rebellious” than last season. “Because of having the confidence of having the shop, and the statement that this is my identity, I felt I could be very free with the coming collection,” she explains. She’s already planning how the clothes will work in the store come spring. “And in between, I have to have a child,” she adds, laughing. “So I have to think of all these things now."