DESIGNER HIGHLIGHT: SIMONE ROCHA
DESIGNER HIGHLIGHT
SIMONE ROCHA
Born and raised in Dublin, Simone Rocha carries her Irish identity not as a backdrop but as a living creative force. She routinely draws from her Irish heritage with references to christenings, communions, weddings, wakes, funerals, Irish stories, myths, and legends. As she has said herself, "I cannot help but always reference Ireland because it's where I'm from, and it has such a rich heritage" — from the mass cards her grandmother collected that inspired her recurring use of veils, to the phenomenal ritual and tradition she witnessed in Irish funerals. This emotional rootedness is what gives her work its distinctive gravity: she is not borrowing from Irish culture so much as translating it, season after season, into cloth.
The AW20 collection stands as one of the most distilled expressions of this vision. Rocha cited Dublin-born playwright John Millington Synge's 1904 work Riders to the Sea as the season's anchor — a play in which a woman from the Aran Isle of Inishmaan grieves the loss of her husband and sons to the sea, centered on the rituals humans use to cope with loss. The collection opened in creamy, tea-stained silks before moving from baptism and communion into death and mourning — and Rocha acknowledged post-show that "you can't research Ireland without Catholicism creeping in," pointing to the Sacred Heart embroideries and the name of Saint Malachy printed across dresses. The show closed with three white lace-veiled gowns worn as mourning dress — darkness rendered in light, a contradiction as Irish as the island itself.
That translation is perhaps nowhere more literal than in her engagement with Irish folklore. Over the years, her collections have reached into specific folk stories — from the myth of the Children of Lír to the ancient harvest festival of Lughnasa — using these narratives to explore old courting traditions and how they might influence fabrication and textiles. Her AW22 collection pulled deeply from the dark, mystical tale of The Children of Lír, staging models on a spherical runway designed to resemble a lake, the story's iconic setting. For Rocha, folklore is not decorative — it is structural, shaping the emotional arc of an entire collection from concept through to silhouette.
With the majority of her team being women, Simone Rocha has exclaimed in interviews that creating a design label with women at the forefront is "an amazing mix of creativity, inspiration and hard work."
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