Simone Rocha will sign Jean Paul Gaultier’s next haute couture collection

This becomes one of the most exciting style exercises of fashion weeks. After the retirement of the great couturier in January 2020, the house that bears his name Jean Paul Gaultier has returned to ready-to-wear and entrusts the reins of its haute couture to a different talent every semester. It started with Chitose Abe (Sacai), then Glenn Martens (Y/Project and Diesel), Olivier Rousteing (Balmain), Haider Ackermann (it would be precisely in this show that the unlikely couple Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner would meet), and recently Julien Dossena (Rabanne).

Now it’s up to Simone Rocha to combine the codes of the Jean Paul Gaultier maison with its romantic and rebellious aesthetic.

Who is Simone Rocha, the next artistic director to lead a Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture collection

Born in 1986, Simone Rocha is an Irish designer. The daughter herself of a designer for whom she worked from the age of 13 to 18, she continued her education at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, then at the prestigious Central Saint Martins in London. She presented her graduate collection in 2010 at the Tate Modern, and immediately impressed with her wistful flirtatiousness. This quickly led to it being sold at Dover Street Market, considered the most cutting-edge concept store in Europe (since the late Colette…). We could summarize her way of clashing romantic pieces with darker, more severe ones with her taste for gauzy pastel pink dresses under bondage harnesses, for example.

In 2014 she was among the finalists of the LVMH award and the magazine Harper’s Bazaar named her designer of the year, before the British Fashion Awards did the same in 2016. After a luxury collaboration with Moncler in 2018, she signed a mass distribution collaboration with H&M in 2021, which allowed her to popularize the codes.

Benefiting from the know-how of haute couture workshops like those of Jean Paul Gaultier should soon allow Simone Rocha to take her voice and vision even further. Answer on the Parisian catwalks of January 2024.