There is an ethereally beautiful and romantic quality in the indefatigable passion that, season after season, satiates John Rocha’s sartorial thirst and renews his delicate appreciation for women and for the Edwardian trope of the female silhouette as flower. If that was not enough, for his Spring/Summer 2014 collection, the Irish designer added an elegantly codified representation of femininity that, in the duality between innocent tenderness and experienced toughness, describes how the young girl grows up to become a confident and sophisticated woman.
For the presentation of the collection on 14 September 2013 during London Fashion Week, Rocha featured 25 looks that established the physical transformation towards womanhood in a gradation of the colour palette that started with white and ivory and gradually embraced dashes of lemon yellow, emerald green, scarlet, fuchsia, violet and indigo before becoming entirely black. Similarly (and albeit in a reversed process of the blossoming of flowers), silhouettes morphed from voluminous shapes made from delicate and flowing layers of white sheer silk organza and couched georgette to the structured and frayed-edged lines of slim and elongated dresses in glazed and lacquered lace as a way to describe how the asexual and incorporeal child matures into the seductive and curvaceous woman.
As in John Rocha’s previous women’s wear creations, texture and embellishment play key roles in the Spring/Summer 2014 collection, with the notion of physical and metaphorical growth remaining permanently anchored by the densely worked surfaces of a range of exquisite hats and bags made from contorted rigid organza piping.
