Simone Rocha on how lockdown has shaped the future of her work

This year has forced even the Luddites online.

Everyone uses Zoom, and Apple Pay has helped speed the switch away from cash. At the same time there has been a resurgence of interest in the heartier, more physical aspects of life: the kneading of bread, the arranging of flowers. We are all more digital and yet more practical. And Simone Rocha, one of the most talented and influential designers of her generation, is no exception.

Rocha’s Spring/Summer 21 collection, which she has just shown via private appointments as part of a radically pared-down London Fashion Week, is focused on ‘intimacy, human nature and the human form’, she explains. When she and the design team were forced to work from home during the coronavirus lockdown, ‘the process of working by hand became even more important — it became even more physical’.

Of course, though, most people will engage with the collection, initially at least, through online imagery. A big show was obviously out of the question, which is a shame because over the past few years Simone Rocha shows have become a highlight of LFW, often featuring unexpected, noteworthy casting (Chloë Sevigny, older models, stars of Irish theatre).

It remains to be seen whether, by the time the collection actually lands in store early next year, things will be back to normal but it feels safe to say that there is a new digital element of life — and of fashion — that is here to stay. Rocha opened an online store while her three shops (in New York, London and Hong Kong) were closed during lockdowns and she plans to continue with that, even as people start venturing out to shop again.

I’m talking to the Dublin-born London designer over Zoom: she’s working in her studio in De Beauvoir, a short walk from the home she shares with her partner and five-year-old daughter. Wearing a padded hair band and a white blouse (it’s 2020 so I have no idea what she’s wearing on her bottom half), she is open and upbeat. She laughs at the end of half her sentences, whether they contain a joke or not. With Rocha, who has just turned 34, jokes are never far away, even when we discuss the chaos of the fashion industry.

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The coronavirus crisis revealed fundamental problems with the industry’s relentless carousel of shows and collections. The waste and excess was laid bare — and the toil that takes on designers discussed with a rare honesty. Rocha admits that she feels almost relieved. ‘It’s like the plaster has been ripped off,’ she says. There’s a wound, raw and painful, and no one is really sure what to do about it — but at least it’s out in the open.

‘I’ve been doing this [producing collections] for 10 years and in the last few years things have got so extreme,’ she says, referencing the pressures placed on designers. She acknowledges that running an independent label means she has been in a privileged position: she is in control of the Simone Rocha shops and of every single design decision. She also controls the scale of her own business. ‘I’ve always done two collections a year but people were showing six or 12 collections,’ she points out. ‘It’s unsustainable.’

The questions about immediate survival are obviously crucial but the soul-searching must extend beyond this season, she says. ‘For me, it’s not even about how you survive, because were we all surviving the way we were going anyway? It’s more about what our output should be.’

Over the past decade Rocha’s eccentric-but-wearable, feminine-but-complex designs have won her famous fans (Rihanna, Keira Knightley) and serious plaudits (British Womenswear Designer at the British Fashion Awards). They have also changed the way a certain type of woman dresses; whether this woman shops at Simone Rocha or Cecilie Bahnsen or Ganni or & Other Stories, there is a particular look that Simone Rocha undoubtedly ushered in.

That look, which she describes as a ‘feminine practicality’, has always felt natural and sincere to her, she says, so to see it suddenly everywhere has sometimes felt quite alien. ‘When I graduated it wasn’t what was on the high street, it wasn’t what other designers were doing. It was very particular. Now it has translated into a new generation of designers and into the high street. Some days I take it as compliment; some days, I don’t.’

She says that when she is struggling to feel flattered by copycats she reminds herself that she didn’t invent tulle or blouses. She did, though, I say, basically invent the hair slide when she included pearl barrettes in her Spring/Summer 18 show and spawned a million replicas. She hoots with laughter. ‘We just say, “We brought back the hair slide!” And now, you can get them in chemists and petrol stations! It’s terrible! You have to laugh.’

Rocha was brought up in Dublin — her father is John Rocha, the Hong Kong-born fashion designer, and her mother, Odette, has been a central figure at both John and Simone’s labels. She loves her hometown, and her experience of Dublin seems particularly charming. When she tells me how she met her partner, it sounds like an Irish romcom storyline: Bono, an old friend of her father’s, introduced her to Eoin McLoughlin, a cinematographer, at a Christmas party in Grogans, one of the city’s quaintest pubs. They discovered that they lived near each other in east London and they’ve been together ever since.

A move to the British capital had always been on the cards and Rocha came as soon as she finished her BA in fashion design at Dublin’s National College of Art and Design, securing a place on the prestigious MA at Central Saint Martins, studying under the late Louise Wilson. ‘I wanted to get the best education I could and Louise Wilson was the best educator,’ she says. She had also found herself craving a degree of anonymity that Dublin couldn’t offer. Was she seeking to establish herself in a different city from her father, I wonder? No, she says, it wasn’t about escaping family — her parents live between London and Dublin and the family is ‘incredibly close’. During lockdown, she would cycle from her home in Hackney to their place in central London, dropping off groceries and chatting through the window.

‘My dad is actually here today,’ she says, as she points to another part of the studio. ‘He’s here all the time so it’s not like I got away from that.’ Ireland is constantly with her, too. As she chats, she sits in front of a wall of bookshelves: there are hundreds of art books and exhibition catalogues, but the Irish influence is most obvious in the novels, plays and poetry. ‘I have Paul Durcan, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett — I’m always thinking of home,’ she says, explaining that her reading influences the ‘narratives of her collections, if that makes sense’. She loves Sally Rooney, too: ‘Being from Dublin, growing up there, I thought both her books were nail on the head.’

This year has been tough — of course it has. When the pandemic hit, she was forced to close her studio and her shops for months. As the fashion industry reckoned with its sudden and strange irrelevance, the Black Lives Matter protests highlighted the racism and lack of diversity often present in the industry. ‘Being mixed race, it doesn’t feel alien to me,’ she says of the anti-racist movement, ‘but at the same time, it’s made myself and many others re-educate ourselves on the imbalance of diversity of the industry.’ Meanwhile, she has looked on at Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong with sadness: she has aunts and uncles there and a lot of her team are from Hong Kong, too.

‘No one wanted to run away and hide under a rock in the west of Ireland more than me,’ she admits, looking back on the spring. ‘But I couldn’t do that.’ London is where she works. She came here to work more than a decade ago and she has plenty of work still to do, now more than ever.

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Simone Rocha's fantastical feminine fashion at London Fashion Week