Simone Rocha still recalls the conversation with her school principal, Miss Ruddock. “What she told me was the story of The Tortoise And The Hare. She said that in education or in life, you will be either one or the other. And I remember coming out thinking, ‘Mmm. I’m so ready to be a tortoise.’” Slow and steady win the race. It’s been 15 years since Rocha founded her label: since then she’s plodded her way to near-apex status in the British capital. Even if you chiefly rate London Fashion Week according to generated influencer impressions—which some this season are perplexingly doing—Rocha’s renown is undeniable.
This time out she allowed herself to look back a little, incorporating multiple Rocha motifs from the past to fashion a collection that was an assembly of characters and archetypes drawn from memory, nostalgia, and imagination. Take Fiona Shaw, who wore the penultimate look: a black duchesse satin egg dress (the silhouette was also tortoise-ish) cinched at the shoulder and knee by bicycle lock chain hardware. She was the collection’s echo of Miss Ruddock. The bicycle locks were there to symbolize the bicycle sheds, that archetypal site of illicit schooldays romancing (and smoking), but also fresh examples of Rocha’s ongoing experiments with forms of restraint.
Bel Powley and Alexa Chung’s looks featured a dress and a coat adapted from the perfecto jacket paradigm: cool girls, possibly mean. Chung’s faux fur Barbarella bra top was part of a fulsome faux fur offer that stemmed from the hare in Rocha’s starting point: several of the looks featured (faux) hares worn as stoles or carried at the hip. Menswear included ruffled rugger tops, bead-detail suiting and a great belted fishtail parka accessorized with a resin tortoise clutch that was (appropriately) the less ostentatious foil to those hare pieces.
Back to womenswear, faux fur coats were sliced to ribbons halfway up from their hemlines, a gesture repeated across the collection. We saw it in dresses and a top fashioned from strips of pink silk jacquard, then bound together with pink ribbon. One dress was a curtain of sliced stripes of pink ribbon and jacquard that fell from the neckline and was worn over faux fur bloomers. Jackets and skirts in Rocha’s tinsel-strafed bouclé tweed were also given the shredder treatment. Harnessing, lingerie, and of course ruffles were further Rocha touchstones returned to in looks that conjured abstract portraits ranging from emo to naive. The variation of characters gave Rocha license to vary her casting, a welcome gesture whose crescendo was the magisterial appearance of Shaw. Backstage the great actress extolled “the intensity of the beauty of it. You walk through these spaces with beautiful people wearing astonishing clothes. I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.” Rocha’s tortoise plods beautifully on.
