For the Simone Rocha Spring 2021 RTW collection, the designer presented the new lineup with a group of 10 models standing apart within the white walls of the Hauser & Wirth gallery.

“I’m not going to lie: I’ll be the first to say I love runway shows,” Rocha had said ruefully earlier. “Now that the pace of shows has been stripped away, I wanted to find a space to represent that. It’s important to me to find a way to physically share the collection, just for the silhouette, texture, and weight of it. Clothes are made of cloth, and emotions, and they come to life on a body.”

Sobering and exploding, pragmatic and foreboding, were key words Rocha would describe the collection inspired by Richard Prince’s erotic Bettie Kline images and paintings of Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II, with her celebrated jewel-bedecked bosom on display.

Close up, the layers held little messages on the tulle veiling with patterns of castles in the broderie anglaise, SR monograms. There were the pearls which are now her signature, as headdresses, breast outliners, and scaled up in 3D to form a bag.