Fiona Shaw
Fiona Shaw’s introduction to the Rocha family came via a set of water glasses designed by patriarch John Rocha, which she purchased one by one as a young Cork-born actor living in London. “They were terribly expensive, but I would save up. We were so relieved that someone took a water glass – a thing that was all engraved and Irish and olde-fashioned – and modernised it. I loved them,” she recalls.
Shaw, 67, encountered John’s daughter’s work in 2024, when she was promoting the Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters in New York and borrowed a powder-pink brocade Simone Rocha coat dress. Shaw doesn’t relish red carpets, but the coat made her feel “dressed”. “It reminded me of Yeats poetry. I used to speak, ‘That is no country for old men. The young/In one another’s arms’, and I didn’t really know what it meant, but there was a heft to it that made me feel very empowered. I feel similarly about Simone’s clothes.”
Fiona Shaw wears Simone Rocha oversized cotton poplin shirt with crystal embellishment, £925, leather brogues, £795, Perspex duck bag with pearl strap, £595, and crystal-embellished socks, POA. Trousers and sunglasses, Shaw’s own © Niall Hodson
Feeling empowered does not equate to wearing Simone Rocha on a daily basis. “She’s very keen on pearls, a thing I only associate with my mother and therefore would not ever wear,” Shaw says, gesturing at a white pearlescent duck-shaped handbag. Nevertheless, she is happy to pose with it in the July sunshine outside the Estorick Collection in Canonbury, north London, near where she lives, and incidentally where she married her Sri Lankan economist wife, Sonali Deraniyagala. “Simone has turned the pearl into something irreverent – she has inherited this ‘kick’ thing of her father’s.”
