The Fashion Week Cheat Sheet contains everything you need to know about the new collections. After speaking with the designers about their inspiration, their hero pieces, the faces on the catwalk and the names on the front row, we present your complete guide to autumn/winter 2024. Simone Rocha was back in London this weekend to show her autumn/winter 2024 collection at a church in Farringdon. The collection was inspired by Queen Victoria's mourning dress and featured a lot of sheer dressing. Rocha says that she took away a lot from her time in the couture atelier.
She told me that she took away two things from working on the couture collection. I wanted to bring that discipline back with me because it was interesting to discipline myself to do that. The attention to detail when it comes to the embellishment techniques is something that I found very exciting and I wanted to see how I could achieve some of that in a ready-to-wear capacity. We have a lot of embroidered handwork, so you can feel it.
The theme is inspiration.
This season is the final chapter of a trilogy because I was working on the past three collections at the same time. This began with my spring/summer 'The Dress Rehearsal', and then the couture collection with Jean Paul Gaultier 'The Procession', and then this one, which I have nicknamed 'The Wake'. I wanted to do a proposition that felt very differential, so I created this collection. I went with the collection when I looked at these.
Black dresses and coats in sheer fabrics dominated the collection, but sat alongside nude pieces and some more volute styles, while there was plenty of corsetry and lots of faux fur.
I see them bleed into one another, and it's difficult to separate them. It is hard to separate men's and women's because there is a real spectrum, but I love the way the silhouettes are close to the body. Satellites have a spotlight.
The setting.
I wanted to show in the chapel in central London so that we could have a feeling of togetherness, which is something I haven't been able to do before. I wanted the presentation in the church to be salon-style, so the seats are very close together, and you're very close to the clothes, so I wanted to show in layers. The image is of Tristan Fewings.
There were a lot of A-list couples in the front row, includingAlexa Chung and Tom Sturridge. They were joined by others.
The message was sent.
"Fashion is a reflection of the times, and right now it is very emotional, and so I hope that it feels significant for the times we're living in." You can get more on London Fashion Week here.