New Icons: Simone Rocha’s Kick in the Teeth
New Icons: Gothic Obsession in Sculptural Perspex
New Icons celebrates the stories behind particularly notable pieces from this season.
When Simone Rocha staged her Spring/Summer 2017 collection at Southwark Cathedral, she didn’t just bring Irish land girls to Sunday church—she weaved into the collection an arabesque story of morbid romance à la Edgar Allan Poe, with a visual narrative somewhere between baptismal and sepulchral. Amongst all the pretty lace dresses and religious purity, kinky details flashed a subtle eroticism. Encompassing the eerie allure of the Gothic, her Perspex tooth heels saw the innocent ballet-reminiscent shape give way to ghastly tooth sculptures. This is the ingenious mélange of Rocha’s signature girlishness and her penchant for space-age materials.When Egaeus fell, it was not for the radiant beauty of his betrothed—it was for her shiny white teeth. For the hero of Poe’s Gothic tale Berenice, her teeth had become objects of obsessive fixation, promising peace for his clouded mind, if he could only possess them. The pristine ivories represented evanescence, and his fervent lust for them drove the story to its violent end. In the horrific final chapter, Egaeus is awoken from his monomaniacal trance to find that the objects he desired most had not liberated him, but had, in fact, destroyed him. While historical, Poe’s parable of object fetishism, of a longing for possession that torments the mind, is a very contemporary narrative—it tells of the constant hunger and fear that impel tragedy.Drawing from religious attire and a psychological symbol of mortality, mourning, and remembrance, Rocha grasps current socio-political emotions in a most sensible manner. These tooth-heeled pumps are a brilliant confrontation—if not proclamation and parody—of the sentiment of our time, a time driven by the evangelical worship of possession, and the terror of losing it. It is a fantastic visual story of a mythical object of fixation, the tooth, encapsulated in that very capitalist object of fixation, the shoe. Consider the tooth fairy—isn’t she a sort of gleaming standard-bearer of capitalism, asking us to trade something of ourselves for a dime? Now, Simone Rocha brings back that something.
What Do Rolexes and Psychedelics Have in Common? Collector and Entrepreneur Alejandro Alcocer on the Ineluctable Pull of Time and Objects Alejandro Alcocer seems to have lived many lifetimes — all at once. In his early teens, he started a successful business importing skateboards into Mexico. At the age of 16 he was accepted to MIT. By the first half of his 20s, he was working as a cook at the legendary Basque restaurant, Arzak. In the early 2000s, Alcocer started Green Brown Orange, a color-coded kingdom of cafes, sustainability projects, and immersive catering experiences based in New York’s Lower East Side. 
Beyond Binaries With TOGA Japanese Designer Yasuko Furuta Explains Her Hybrid Aesthetic The toga, like the kimono, was once the uniform of the people. But Yasuko Furuta’s TOGA is anything but common. Nurtured on a steady diet of vintage rockabilly gear in the town of Nagoya and shaped by a fashion education in Paris, Furuta stands apart from her Japanese contemporaries with a voice that blends Western subcultural tropes and refined femininity. TOGA is now showing in London after a stint in Paris, and the zeitgeist is finally catching up to Furuta’s aesthetic — she fits right into fashion’s current fixation with off-kilter, atemporal vintage mash-ups. 
Adventures in Denim with Aitor Throup The High-Performance Conceptualist Explains Raw Research Aitor Throup has come a long way. Not in the geographic sense—his current Amsterdam office is just 300 miles away from his hometown of Burnley in England’s post-industrial north—but from a period of his career that threatened to consign him to the life of a paper architect, producing high-concept designs impossible to produce at scale within fashion’s seasonal cycles. Now, as executive creative director of Dutch denim giant G-Star, all bets are off.