Inspired by Queen Victoria’s Mourning Dress, Simone Rocha Designed for a Playful Eternal Rest
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Simone Rocha knew her Fall 2024 collection would be about mourning her Jean Paul Gaultier couture collection, before either were even born.
The designer considers the three collections she created in the past year—two for her eponymous brand, and one as guest couturier for Jean Paul Gaultier Couture—to be a "trilogy." “I couldn’t not think about them at the same time,” she told me back in January, before the couture show. The Simone Rocha Spring 2024 show was “the dress rehearsal,” with models holding flowers made entirely out of beads while wearing dresses seamed with boning made of roses, hinting at what was to come. Her Jean Paul Gaultier Couture collection, which she called “the procession,” appropriately had the entire internet, to use their preferred parlance, “dead.” Finally, the Simone Rocha Fall 2024 show, held yesterday at St. Bartholomew’s Church, was “the wake.”
The more somber tone of the latest collection to Rocha felt like fate. “It's very serendipitous that while I was also looking at these Gaultier archives, I had access to Queen Victoria's archives in London and to her mourning dress in particular,” she said. She wasn’t just thinking about death and grief but about the way we preserve our memories. How do we hold onto the feeling of what we once knew when it is gone?
“I’ve always thought there’s something so powerful in the way that you dress, the way that it can reflect your feelings or protect you from the feelings of others,” she continued. When you get dressed for a wake you wear all black out of respect for the dead but also as a way to step out of yourself. You make peace with the darkness by becoming one with it.
As would be expected with a collection inspired by death, there were plenty of all-black looks. But they were Simone Rocha’s take on an all-black look, which meant there was transparent paneling, faux fur detailing, crystal-embellished breast pockets, and plenty of tulle. The notion of protection also felt well represented in long tent-like dresses made to look like a children’s nightgown with a large bulbous bow tied at the center, worn with large stuffed animals clutched at the chest.
The shaggy creatures with red beaded eyes were modeled after the Church Grim, a guardian spirit figure of English folklore that’s said to protect church grounds from the devil. They also allegedly appear before a church bell announces a death and can be seen standing far off at a funeral in the church tower, its exact position a symbol of whether the departed soul is headed to heaven or hell. Seeing models nuzzle them like security blankets encapsulated the entire collection with one gesture: grappling with the unknown by holding it close.
Not everything was so serious, either. This actually felt like one of Rocha’s more whimsical collections, maybe most evidently seen through a transparent beige dress covered in faux black fur figures of the Church Grim, its lanky legs hovering over hips and collarbones. With plenty of sheerness and waist-cinching corsets, the collection also felt just as much about sex as it did about eternal rest.
“Reliving and rebreathing / Perverse intention and intersection of ideas / the final resolution,” read the sonnet Rocha wrote in her show notes. It might have been a wake of sorts, but nothing is ever entirely dead in her universe. It’s very much like a fairytale in that sense, and the rebirth of an even more playful Rocha appears to be sitting on the next page.
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