Simone Rocha Made Artist Genieve Figgis Her 'Provocative' Muse for Spring/Summer 2025
A collaboration between the Irish creatives beautifully dramatizes female subjectivity.
Art and fashion are always in conversation, and sometimes it's more clear-cut than others. For designer Simone Rocha, this theme is a focal point for Spring/Summer 2025.
Artist Genieve Figgis’s revisionist spin on Art History 101 has made her a muse to both Marc Jacobs and Bridgerton. The Irish painter’s candy-colored canvases offer funhouse mirror–inversions of canonical portraits from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “The Swing” to Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” with their female subjects’ faces melting into swirling pools of paint. After seeing an exhibition of Figgis’s work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, London-based Irish designer Simone Rocha recognized a kindred spirit in the fellow National College of Art and Design alum. “I was immediately drawn to this idea of the paintings referencing period, but twisted and manipulated, disturbed and displaced,” Rocha says.
Rocha drove to meet the artist at her studio on the picturesque Irish Sea coast south of Dublin and invited her to collaborate on the Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. “The narrative of the collection is this idea of performance and being displayed—I felt this was very connected to her paintings, in particular the painting ‘Olympia,’” explains Rocha, referencing Figgis’s rendition of Édouard Manet’s reclining courtesan, with lips drawn back to reveal yellow teeth and one abnormally large pupil.
They wrapped Figgis’s macabre sex worker around a long-sleeve T-shirt and also printed her “Lady with a Bird”—a ghoulish pastiche of genre paintings depicting women holding parakeets—on a ballet mesh bodysuit. “I wanted the collection to be provocative, to poke, to tease,” says Rocha.
