Rocha first discovered Dean’s work through the 2015 series Pom Pom Girls, images that document the quotidian outfits of Mongolian school girls topped with exuberant hair scrunchies in contrast with the vast and sandy landscapes of their desert homes. Dean and her husband moved from London to the English countryside before lockdown this February, settling in an old flower nursery filled with outbuildings, greenhouses, fields and woodlands. Though initially a daunting task, their crumbling archipelago would soon provide the perfect backdrop for Dean’s creative projects.
On reaching out to the Irish designer, Dean admits, ‘Somehow, I just knew it had to be Simone’. Their conversations saw Dean reveal her newfound home to Rocha along with sweeping views and seascapes. Rocha was on board in an instant, and sent pieces from the Autumn Winter 2020 collection. ‘There was something very freeing in having time to discover and re-discover Simone’s pieces,’ she told A Magazine. ‘It wasn’t, “we’ve shot that outfit, onto the next;” it was a very different process for me, as there was no time restriction and there was no brief. It was me doing the things I wanted to do.’
Originally Dean planned to comment on the Spring lockdown through her images. ‘I wanted to record it in some way but didn’t want it to be pure documentation. It was about the transformation and really focusing on myself and my family.’ After a personal loss in recent months, Dean was grieving, too. ‘When I talk about heartbreak and heart joy in the zine, it’s sort of the absolute extremes of a change of life, family, loss of family, being isolated, feeling immensely grateful and lucky whilst also grieving and feeling heartbroken.’ Admitting some friends and family members have met the zine with floods of tears, Dean explores the beauty in sadness as a running chord that builds to a crescendo across the zine. ‘When I had my son, I was nervous about being a mum in a creative industry, I won’t lie,’ she continued ‘And I felt concerned about people knowing that I was a mum and this idea that you’re not as available or your input is somehow less. I took my son to Mongolia when I was pregnant and that created quite a stir.’ Often, she explained, people want to hide the fact they are mothers in the fashion industry. ‘I can respect that, because I understand where it comes from,’ she reflected.