Echo. Wrapped in Memory, Lanoo Publishers, 2023
Echo explores the intimate connection between clothing and memory, with a focus on the works of artist Louise Bourgeois, designer Simone Rocha, and choreographer and dancer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. It offers a unique look at garments that reveal the life story of their previous wearers.
Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at MoMu (Fashion Museum Antwerp) from 15 October 2023 – 18 March 2024.
Echo, the exhibition, focuses on “memories of infancy, childhood and motherhood, ageing and nostalgia, handmaking and repair, and both the physical and emotional memories of clothing.” Curated by Elisa De Wyngaert, it features work by Louise Bourgeois, Marianne Berenhaut, Billie Zangewa, Cassi Namoda, Cathy Wilkes, Harley Weir, Maya Barrera, Martin Margiela, Liz Magor and Laila Gohar.
Stoppard’s text focused on the designer Simone Rocha.
Extract
When Simone Rocha talks about her past collections, she refers not to seasons but to names, used more for herself, as memories, than as formal public titles: Baby Teeth (Spring/Summer 2022), Riders to the Sea (Autumn/Winter 2020), Red Dolls (Spring/Summer 2018), Children of Lir (Autumn/Winter 2022), Wren Boys (Spring/Summer 2020). If questioned about particular looks, or catwalk moments – S/S this, A/W that – she’ll often pull up visuals, online, to check what she made when. ‘I never get the dates right’, she says. She remembers her shows instead by the stories: the ideas, images, characters and details that were igniting her imagination at the time – a baby wrapped in cloth; a spot of blood on a bedsheet; a fisherman, lost at sea; a mother knitting; a Tudor courtier, desperate to assert herself without breaking the expectations of silence and decorum that dictate her life; a body moving through time, cloth tenderly caressing its form.
Lou Stoppard: First, slightly based on your last show, A/W 23, I’d like to talk about the role of history and historical research within your work. You often include details that seem lifted from other eras. Tell me how you draw on the past.
Simone Rocha: It always starts with a storytelling element, and then a question of where that story is, in time. One of my collections, Spring/Summer 2022, I call it Baby Teeth, was built around the time my second daughter was born. Very naturally, I was thinking about the ideas of nursing and swaddling, and then I started to look at the history of swaddling in different eras, and thinking about how that could contribute to some of the manipulation of the garments, in terms of layers or draping. So, it always comes from a storytelling element, and then picking out a period that that story relates to and looking into the dress and costume and customs of the time – really digging deep into that period. I’m often interested in a mixture of things, some aesthetic, some more to do with social norms. For example, A/W 14, which was inspired by the Elizabethan era. I found it interesting looking into the construction of garments, whether in terms of the exaggerated hip panels or the necklines, but I was also fascinated by what that would represent. These clothes were the only form of voice that women had, so that also plays into it: the history of the dress of that time is actually also the dialogue of the female at that time, who might not have had a voice. There’s also, within the historical references, always a craft thing – growing up in Ireland, craft was very present – I would hand-knit and hand-crochet. I’ve always been attracted to – and have felt comforted by – doing things by hand. I think you see that with the Riders to the Sea collection, which was A/W 20, which was all about [the Irish playwright] John Millington Synge’s play of the same name [1904], in which a mother lost all of her sons and her husband to the sea. The play was set on the Aran Islands, so I started to think about Irish Aran knits, and how different details and weaves would represent different families, and we came up with a knit that was for a fictitious family. It got knitted into these pieces that were almost like bibs or even life jackets. So, you see there, it’s a dual thing, of storytelling with the time and place and what certain details represented, and then looking at it in terms of what I want to say within that collection, and how it plays into the garments themselves.
‘They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me…. I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.’ – John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea.