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Simone Rocha’s Fall/Winter 2024 collection is the finale in a three-part sequence the designer curated for her latest three shows. Beginning with “The Dress Rehearsal” for Spring/Summer 2024, it continued with her guest designer collection “The Procession” for Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2024 Haute Couture show in January and concluded yesterday with the romantically bleak “The Wake” at London’s St. ‘Bartholomew the Great’ Anglican Church.
Like all Rocha’s designs, this was an ethereal escapade written in charcoal. A Grimm fable of aberrant grandeur with an unsettling feeling of malevolence. Rocha’s supreme textural contrasts like rich furs and soft silks as well as her architecturally designed organza silhouettes should, on paper, equate to a fairytale of lithe themes. In reality, however, the discourse is much darker.
The theatre of melancholy is Rocha’s creative discipline. Through the balancing of technical Empirical costume (damask silks and Victorian boudoir silhouettes) with the modernity of deconstructed elegance (eerie diaphanous night gowns and jarring metallic flowers) Rocha explored the final years of Queen Victoria, the celebrated monarch who reigned over the United Kingdom during the 19th Century. While the first two shows played out her earlier life, Fall/Winter was an ode to the solemnity of her death.
Theming aside, however, Rocha’s aptitude for articulating a Renaissance proceeds her. There are few artists whose designs maintain such strength of conviction – from her sold out H&M line in 2021, to her heavily lauded Genius collaboration with Moncler in 2018 to her recent orbit at Gaultier, and this collection follows.
The shawled fur coats pinned with jewelled brooches then worn over long, petticoat skirts and silver bedazzled Crocs (from her latest collaboration with the shoe company) seek revenge on the idea of simple cosplay and strike an emotional bond with covetable, unique high fashion. The organza shrugs with oversized pussy-bows, the drop-waist balloon gowns and the mourning ensembles in corseted and braided black make this a regal rapture sure to be on the wishlist for any Rocha enthusiast. Victoria herself was known to be have stealth for personal style – being credited for inventing the traditional white wedding dress among other long-lasting looks – she was a pioneer of female power, coming to throne at just 18 years old.
Viscerally, Victoria had great influence over her empire and this is what Rocha has set out to appropriate. The strength that came from of a life of service and the beauty that concluded its earthly expanse is something worth rediscovering. Long live the memory of the Queen.
