“The Irish are dominating art scenes across the world, and the fashion sector is no exception. Derry designer Johnathan Anderson was appointed creative director of Dior last year, Dublin-born Laura Weber embroidered former first lady Dr Jill Biden’s dress for her husband’s inauguration in 2021, and Simone Rocha, also a Dublin native, is reaching new heights with her own brand – and she’s taking her home nation with her. A graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Rocha first debuted her brand at London Fashion Week in 2010. More recently, her Irish heritage has become a distinct source of inspiration for her work, evident in her latest show, constructed in three parts: TÍR NA NÓG, PONY KID and WEIRD SISTERS. Speaking with ELLE last year about her autumn/winter 2025 collection, Rocha said, “There will be nods to the past, but I also wanted it to feel a little bit displaced, so it feels new today. While I was looking at the past, I didn’t want the collection to feel nostalgic”. A year on, the same sentiment applies to Rocha’s latest collection, and while it threatens to feel somewhat nostalgic in its adaptation of suits and corsets so fixed in time in the early 1900s, it draws inspiration from elements of Irish culture that have seemingly vanished from our general understanding of our history. In doing so, she drapes these sources over a modern frame: Adidas tracksuits, genderless styling and short shorts. One such subject of Rocha’s interest in this collection is the Yeats sisters, stowed away in history under James Joyce’s label in Ulysses, as “weird sisters”, a term Rocha adopts to name her final act. The sisters, Elizabeth and Lily, so often overshadowed by their famous brothers and excluded from history, set up the Cuala Press together during the cultural revival in the early 1900s. It was an arts project that solely employed women and produced prints and artwork, painting a romanticised image of Ireland: rolling green hills and quaint villages. The work was revolutionary at the time, as these pieces challenged the harmful, dehumanising stereotypes of Ireland and its people perpetuated by British colonisers and contributed largely to changing the way the Irish were viewed abroad. The Yeats sisters contributed significantly to the formation of an independent national culture and identity at a critical time in history, and, in doing so, provided a space for women to work and express themselves artistically – a radically feminist and nationalistic act to commit at the time. It is a fitting source of inspiration for Rocha, who consistently centres the power of femininity in her work. During the decade of the establishment of the Cuala Press, women’s fashion consisted of corsets, ornamentation of clothes with ribbons and lace and rich fabrics such as silk. Rocha ends her show with “monster ballgowns” constructed of ribbons strung through loops resembling the design of the corset, and contrary to its shaping purpose in 1908, the ribbons hang and trail by the models’ feet as they move along the runway. The influence of the Cuala Press artwork on Rocha’s collection can be found in the striking green shade that appears in silk and stands out against white and black pieces, which she refers to as “peat green”. Rocha also credits Jack B Yeats as inspiration for this collection. Namely, his 1936 painting “In Tír na nÓg”. The painting depicts a boy lying under a tree in a beautiful, green landscape, reading a book and gazing at people across a river. The image is derived from the myth of Tír na nÓg, the island of eternal youth, where lovers Niamh and Oisín went to live together. In an interview with Vogue about the collection, Rocha said, “I wanted to take this mythicism and cut it with realism”. Her approach to this piece in terms of fashion is the idea of eternity and the “immortality of clothes”. She frames the repurposing of clothes, of cutting things up and transforming them into something new at the centre, playing with shapes and patterns that suggest they were once something other than that now presented. She calls the pieces “hand-me-downed, found”. This skill of recycling clothes was likely present in nearly every Irish household in 1936, when lavish spending on clothes was impossible, and every Irish mother converted the floral tablecloth or curtains into a new dress or vice versa. But as is consistent in this collection, Rocha is not merely drawing on a fossilised practice of the past. Repurposing, making your own clothes and second-hand shopping is more popular than ever today, whether it be vintage or charity shops, flea markets or the sewing machine you stole from your grandmother’s attic, we all live for the day we can say, “thanks I thrifted it”, or “I know right, I made it myself” rather than admit we bought it in Bershka. This element of the collection reinforces qualities of individuality and uniqueness in style, challenging unsustainable trends. Both of these sources are married in Rocha’s middle segment, PONY KID. It is where her engagement with both past and present in this collection is most striking. She takes inspiration from a more modern chapter of Irish history, Perry Ogden’s 1999 photographic collection documenting the kids of suburban Dublin from both Traveller and Settled backgrounds who rode ponies, a culture disappearing even then, under council legislation . Ogden presents his photographs of the children and their horses at the Smithfield Horse Fair, alongside statements from the kids themselves, one of whom quotes, “I had three fillies, white fillies, that day in Smithfield. I was trying to get sales for them that day, so I just rubbed them up a bit, and so you came on the scene like, and I was full of hairs like”. The photographs expressed a merging of old and modern cultures, of the horse-riding tradition, with young boys dressed in sports clothes in the 1990s. Rocha incorporates her collaboration with Adidas here, blending the iconic brand’s tracksuits with woollen cardigans, shearling coats and rosettes. She captions it “sporting breed”. This fusion of two opposing ends of the timeline of Irish culture is at the fore of Rocha’s collection and was emphasised by the meeting of the first design with the last in the round runway layout at Alexandra Palace in London.
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