PARIS — So much thinking has been done about the long piece of ribbon tied into a knot that we call the bow.

But maybe no one has found more profundity in its sweet, silky curves than fashion designer Simone Rocha. In her hands, the bow is no mere adornment. It is a way to gather fabric and a way to reveal the nude skin underneath, pulling between modesty and lasciviousness. It is the cinch of a bungee cord that tightens a functional field jacket in the palest, saccharine pink. It is ornament — a cutesy middle finger on a military bag — and structural, as in the case of a red satin top that is simply an enormous bow. After the birth of her first child in 2015, Rocha made bright-red beaded jewelry that evoked blood, an idea she has evolved into long red bow earrings sold in stores. Bows as postpartum blood: This is not your workaday coquette’s embellishment!

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Rocha sees the trappings of femininity — bows, ruffles, pink and sparkles — as tools for the pursuit of intelligence, mystery and strangeness. What is superficial or light becomes dark, deep. “I’ve always been about harnessing the femininity,” she says. “And it can be grotesque. Red can symbolize love, it can symbolize blood.” Rocha is Irish, and when she says blood, it sounds meaty — even, well, bloody. “It’s those visceral feelings that come through [in my work].”

At first blush, her clothes seem to have much in common with coquettecore, the TikTok phenomenon that indulges girlish pleasures like New York-based designer Sandy Liang’s pretty pinks and tying bows on everything from wineglasses to toilet paper rolls. (When asked what she makes of the social media trend she says: “I don’t even know. It doesn’t even register.”) Her output is in tune with a much larger conversation than stitched debates about whether girlish pleasures represent the downfall of femininity. Her clothes, worn by people with all different gender expressions, are about something more real, far from any kind of “Lolita” fantasy: that femininity is as sweeping and important as the epic experience we grant to masculinity.

“I feel like she’s more generous to women, in a way,” says actress Chloë Sevigny, who has worn Rocha’s clothes for over a decade, including to the Met Gala in 2016, and walked in Rocha’s runway show in 2019. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of men [designers] and how they’re stuffing women into certain things. But often women want to look like that, so who am I to say?” Sevigny seems to find a sense of liberation in the flexibility of Rocha’s clothes. “I hate to say it, but men do not have to age in women’s bodies. I do think that women designing women’s clothes is something different.”

Rocha’s collections are naughty and desirable — a puff of fur on the butt, a clutch of roses heaving at the bodice. You can almost smell the Simone Rocha girl coming — romantic and strange, rosy but musky — and you better not be in her way.

At 37, Rocha is one of the great success stories of her generation, and the rare female creative director who founded her own profitable, independent business. Her clothes make you think, especially about femininity and pleasure: They are see-through, delicate and sensual, but never tight and always easy to wear. “The shapes are challenging, but the colors and the fabrics are always soft,” Sevigny says. “That’s the dichotomy.”

The dress Rocha wore on the day we met, in early March in a tiny Paris hotel where Oscar Wilde and Marlon Brando once snoozed, was a black satin sack dress from the Spring 2024 collection that she says makes her feel “like I could be up in my bed,” but also resembles the abstractly glamorous lines of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s 1967 envelope dress.

Her clothes also have the ability to drive shoppers wild with desire. In her New York store, where a Louise Bourgeois painting — she is Rocha’s favorite artist — hangs on the wall and an enormous honeycomb sculpture by Chinese artist Ren Ri sits in the middle of the room, customers line up to buy her egg-shaped handbags, socks embroidered with rosebuds, slip dresses and puffed confections trimmed with rosettes and lace.

“You need some lust in fashion,” she says, “because it’s more than just products, for me, anyhow. To give [fashion] what it deserves and needs and wants — it needs the want.”

Precious Okoyomon, the Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist whose work combines nature, food and poetry, calls Rocha’s clothes “tiny portals of love.”

“She makes a world inside of a world that plays with form, order and chaos,” they wrote in an email. “It sings to a lil time outside of time, very on its own pace, rhythm and lore.”

Rocha has had a cult following since she launched her brand in 2010, but the past seven months have been an extraordinary period for her: nothing less than a dress rehearsal, a performance and her own funeral.

In September, she showed a marvelous Spring 2024 collection themed around roses — plump and floppy taffeta rosettes on trench coats, gowns and little 1960s party dresses, and long-stemmed blooms tucked into the bodices of transparent, pale-pink mesh dresses as an interpretation of a corset’s boning.

She called it “The Dress Rehearsal,” because two days later, Jean Paul Gaultier would announce Rocha as the guest designer of his couture collection in January. Gaultier, one of fashion’s grandest provocateurs, retired in 2020. Since then he has made his couture shows a rotating honor for younger designers that has the rare ability to catapult talents like Haider Ackermann and Glenn Martens to a new level of fame. Rocha began research for her Gaultier couture collection while she was also designing her own Spring line, and thought of that September show as a teaser of what was to come.

The Gaultier couture show, which Rocha called “The Procession,” was a twisted expression of what it means to look feminine. Gaultier’s famous cone bras became rose thorns; panniers became insectlike skeletons; corset lacings looked like exuberant athletic uniforms, or were left undone in a saucy gesture of liberation. Many designers these days (and consumers and fashion observers, for that matter) fail to account for the mutability of clothes — that one designer’s carefree cropped pant is another’s sinister nod to 1950s conformity. Rocha’s Gaultier collection took those fusty female clichés of oppression and made them statements of cocksure aggression. What appears to be a weakness is really a strength. It was pure sorcery.

How was working in the Parisian atelier of one of fashion’s most notorious rebels? She leans in, as if confessing something indecent. “Fabulous,” she says. Her hair is piled high like a Victorian heiress’s. Getting over a cold, she orders whiskey and tea. “It felt like a present. That’s exactly how it felt. I loved it. It was weird.” She grins, and her eyes glow.

“I think because it’s designer to designer, there was just this complete freedom,” she continues, on Gaultier. “It was very peaceful. Very infectious. It was a real upper.”

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Then, in February in London, she showed one of the most spectacular collections of her career: “The Wake,” a kind of funeral after her whirlwind year, and a treatise on the entwined splendors of sex and death. While making it, Rocha visited Hampton Court Palace to view Queen Victoria’s mourning dress. The Queen wore black for 40 years following the death of her husband, Prince Albert, and Rocha discovered silks wrinkled from their long lives (or deaths) in boxes, heavily boned dresses and fur trims. Marinating on that, she produced creased capes festooned with enormously regal ribbons, mesh suits with operatic mutton sleeves, and transparent dresses covered with sparkling bras and patches of fur. She wanted to carry over the things she loved exploring in the Gaultier show: “The sexuality. The provocation. The bodies. Celebrating the hips and the breast.”

It looked like a testament to the primal human urge to adorn oneself in times of pain.

“There is a darkness in there, but I think that is in all of us,” she continues. “I think it’s on the underbelly and in everything.”

“I’m very pragmatic as a person and a designer,” Rocha says. Rather than change with the times, Rocha’s clothes narrate feelings, moods and ideas. She is much more like Vivienne Westwood or Rei Kawakubo — women questioning the purpose and power of clothes, and how they might transform us — than a designer who dictates what kind of hem length looks correct today.

Rocha’s father, John Rocha, is a designer who ran his own highly successful fashion label for three decades before retiring a decade ago. She calls herself “a fashion nepo baby,” laughing. Her parents helped her immensely with building her business, she emphasizes, and her mother, Odette Rocha, oversees her retailing. “We’re so proud of her,” Odette, who also wears her hair piled in a high black swirl, says. “She loves to work.”

Rocha pushed against the idea of becoming a designer at first but began making clothes as textile artworks as a teenager. She says she realized that “that’s how I can tell stories.”

She attended Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2010, and launched her line that same year at London Fashion Week. London is known for producing wild young fashion talents, like Jonathan Anderson, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, who have burst on the scene only to struggle to build a commercial foundation. A decade and a half after her launch, Rocha’s business has increased in profits every year — her brand is a serious player at a moment when it has never been tougher to make it in fashion. And her name increasingly comes up in conversations about the lack of female design talent at much bigger legacy fashion houses.

“I have a few thoughts,” she says. “The women designers that there are — they’re really good.” Miuccia Prada, Martine Rose, Supriya Lele and Kawakubo are a few she particularly admires. “They’re totally identifiable as themselves. But I do think it’s a bit of a shame, not to give people the opportunity,” she says. “I don’t know why it’s not on the table.”

“I feel like, honestly, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. I think it matters if you’re a good designer. And have conviction and identity.”

Her supporters agree. “I’m such a big proponent of hers,” Sevigny says, “and it’s not even about women uplifting women. It’s about her genius as a designer.”

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Maybe if you peel away the layer of gender, the real issue is the homogeneity in fashion design. Too many brands look the same. “It shouldn’t be about your identity,” she says. “It should be about your ideas.”

But sure, she would entertain the offer of a creative director position at a major fashion house. “Previously it wasn’t my ambition. I always wanted to be an independent designer,” she says. “I grew up looking at Dries [Van Noten], and Rick [Owens], and Comme [de Garcons]. That’s who I wanted to be.” But she loved “the opportunity to tell a story, to have a dialogue with a great house — some of [the brands], it would be hard to say no.”

It’s not hard to look at her and feel a little annoyed at the lack of diversity in fashion leadership, but a little inspired that her success could mean that fashion is heading in the right direction, at least sometimes. Other female designers have told me that, in interviews for large fashion houses, they have been asked when and if they plan to have children. And here is Rocha, a mother of two, who has built her own fashion brand and has several stores.

Louise Wilson, the late Central St. Martins professor whose students included McQueen, Christopher Kane and Rocha, once told Rocha that her clothes were “feminine, modern and strong.”

They probably seem that way because Rocha is that way herself; her obsession with Louise Bourgeois, she says, originates in the fact that “her work was unapologetically personal. It was so autobiographical, but at the same time, detached.” Rocha’s work is intense emotionally and creatively, but the intensity does not come at the expense of her happiness or health.

She uses the word “lucky” a lot: lucky to have a good life partner, lucky to be a woman making clothes, lucky to be successful. At her Fall 2024 show, “The Wake,” she was surrounded by fans and friends who congratulated her for her spectacular run. She cracked into laughter, her Irish brogue coming out in full: “I’m so f----ing lucky — I get to be at my own funeral! Ya get to hear what everyone’s saying about ya.”

Did she like what she heard? “Yes! Everyone’s really nice when you’re gone!”

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