Simone Rocha SS27 at the Old Bailey: Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, lost for about 200 years and found in a Dublin Jesuit house, as the reason for the venue and for sheer
Simone Rocha's SS27 show took over the Old Bailey, and the reference behind it is one of the better stories in art history. Caravaggio painted The Taking of Christ in Rome. After the Mattei family let it go, the attribution slipped to Gerrit van Honthorst and the original was presumed lost. The canvas that turned up in Dublin belongs to the Jesuit community on Leeson Street, who have lent it to the National Gallery of Ireland ever since it was identified. Rocha was born in Dublin, so the painting is a hometown legend as much as a masterpiece. Her reading of it, beauty sitting unnoticed in an ordinary room, sits behind both the venue and the change in the clothes: less armour, more skin, and roses doing the work her layers usually do. It arrives three months after her first standalone menswear show, as guest designer at Pitti Uomo in Florence.