John Rocha believes in destiny. You win some, you lose some - he's done both. Life has a strange, quirky fatedness, he reckons, which takes you into situations and places you couldn't ever imagine. How else could a Christian Brothers boy from Hong Kong end up running an international business from an old warehouse in Dublin? Joss, they call it in Hong Kong. Joss is what saves you when the 550-storey apartment block you live in crashes to the ground without harming a hair on your head and you come through with your mah-jong table intact and ready for the next game.
"Chinese people have that superstitious fix - people always do feng shui when they are opening a shop, even the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank pays people to do feng shui for them," he grins. John Rocha married twice, went bust twice, fathered three children, staged three comebacks, and is now diversifying faster than you can say Chinatown. He might have become Ireland's answer to Terence Conran, but plans for a huge fashion and lifestyle store in Grafton Street collapsed at the last minute. Now, he's carving out an alternative route to much the same destination. Next month, he launches his second line of crystal with Waterford Glass; in November, Richard Branson will unveil Rocha's designs for Virgin 2000, an all-in look for every Virgin Airlines staffer from Jo'burg to New York to Tokyo.
"Richard Branson is just amazing, what dawned on me is how involved he is with every part of his big empire." The Virgin designs are hush-hush, and will remain so until they are launched in November.
Meanwhile, he's made clothes for Prodigy and Oasis, Robbie Williams and Brian Kennedy, and he's creating a laundry-to-luxury corporate concept for the new Ormond Hotel on Dublin's quays, as well as preparing the collections and presentations for his twice-yearly shows in Paris and London, and getting set to launch the Waterford line in the US.
Rocha doesn't seem particularly stressed. He laughs a lot, coming over all warm and amiable, just like in his photos. There's a seductive otherness about him, even though he doesn't play the inscrutable oriental card, making him as engaging as he is charming. But the charm isn't that awful "dah-ling, dah-ling" type you hear in fashion banter. He's cool, quite funky really, with blue-black hair so silky you could slide on it, two perfectly-placed strands of grey the only sign of designer ageing. You sense a physicality not so common in this often fey world, and when he tells you that he really wanted to play professional football, and still fishes as often as he can, that starts to explain it. Rocha is an unladdish lad, stylish but not always fashionable - the man actually insists his beloved Nottingham Forest are about to win their way back into the Premier Division. We're in an office at his Temple Bar warehouse, a predictably discreet, sophisticated building with no name on the door. Racks of clothes line up like orphans, and you want to give them a happy home. Everything is nuanced white, walls bare save for some Clea Van Der Grijn paintings downstairs. Rocha is an archetypal outsider, his very own multi-cultural composite who loves Ireland but insists on keeping his British passport, even though his children slag him about it. Being British is the one constant through his itinerant life.
"If you ask me where do I belong, it would be somewhere in the Irish Sea almost - born in Hong Kong, Chinese mother, Portuguese father from Macao, lived in Europe most of my life. If I were to say tomorrow that I am Irish, people would laugh at me. I always feel, to give up my British citizenship would be to almost betray my upbringing."
He takes the chief executive's chair behind a big empty desk, leaving me a choice between two identical visitor chairs, equally well-padded in black leather but without the headrest that signals he is boss here. I wonder if his chair is cranked up higher than mine. The Rocha business is strong now, managed by John and wife Odette Gleeson, with substantial investment from her millionaire brothers, both commodity brokers whose interests stretch to Larry Goodman's Irish Food Products. Rocha is a commodity too, and he knows it. "The John Rocha label is the most important thing because all this has come about because of it, and if the label goes wrong. . ."
There's Rocha the man, and Rocha the brand; one trades on the other. His label, as established by his fashion designs, earns him the quality cachet which he can, in turn, decide to use for other products, such as the highly-successful Waterford Crystal collection with which he is so pleased. He designs everything himself. Rocha is full of Waterford stories, such as the one about the 75-year-old woman in Australia who'd been collecting it all her life and told him she was thrilled to see something so new and so different. He explains that he got involved with Waterford when the company approached him because it was "losing the younger generation". It took two years to develop, then it couldn't keep up with demand. He loves doing it, because he loves designing. He wouldn't have done it alone. "One thing I learned from all my years in business is you really have to work with the experts - you can launch something yourself, but unless you have the expertise and the marketing strategies and machinery behind you, you'll never be successful. I didn't realise that when I started in business. I thought if I could design, everything would follow, but the designer is only part of the machinery." I want to ask him about failure, because each time he has gone bust, he's come back bigger than ever, and because he seems to thrive on risk, albeit now very carefully managed. Perhaps it's the Hong Kong legacy, what he calls "that humid, overcrowded place" where they love gambling so much they'd bet on the crack of dawn. His parents still live there, married nearly 50 years. Rocha's mother fled communist China after Mao Tse Tung came to power in the 1940s. She was the daughter of a third wife: "We never say she was a concubine," he explains about his grandmother. "Because my mother was the daughter of the third wife, she is always looked down on by the first wife - it is a ladder."
His father goes out now only to the bookie's: Rocha went with him when he was in Hong Kong two weeks ago, but otherwise stopped betting on horses a few years ago, because he hadn't enough time to follow the form. But he still likes the odd flutter in a casino.
Rocha went bust the first time because his marriage to Eily Doolan broke up, and the business was the subject of a tough court case which lasted nine days. "I thought the whole thing was uncalled for, but it happened for the best, for everybody, at the end of the day. At the time I was quite frustrated by the whole thing - I thought there should be a better way."
He began the Chinatown enterprise with new partner and business associate Odette Gleeson. It seemed to thrive, but hit the worst of the last recession, winding up in 1987 with debts of over £257,000.
"I couldn't face the fact that things had gone so wrong. The first time it was really a personal thing, but this was a business thing and it was a really, really sad situation to the extent that you have all these people who believe in you, and we had all tried to achieve this thing we all believed in and it didn't happen, so it took a lot out of me."
Making a living in Ireland was out of the question. Rocha took off to Italy for 18 months with Odette and baby Simone - son Max would soon be born - missing his eldest daughter Zoe whom he could only see every month or so because she lived with her mother. The worst of times. "If I were a lesser man, I would be one of the casualties of life like a lot of my friends because it is a long and rough road, but having said that, I am enjoying the fruits of it now."
What brought them back was the chance to try his first designer piggyback, this time with chain store A-Wear, part of the former Brown Thomas Group. Rocha would create a collection for the company under his label, sparing himself the hassle of marketing and distribution. In exchange, A-Wear could expand its image and customer base by pulling in those young female professionals who could increasingly afford to spend big, not serious, money on off-the-peg designer gear. The formula worked for a while. Rocha's name upped A-Wear's ante, with the chain store winning dream coverage in fashion pages. It went on to form similar alliances with the likes of Quin and Donnelly and Marc O'Neil, both still in stock. Other collaborations were less successful - short-stay designers included Richard Lewis and UK-based Workers for Freedom.
Why did he leave? The received wisdom is Rocha severed his links with A-Wear after winning British Designer of the Year, but that's not the full story. Rocha is cautious: pressed, he will only confirm it had to do "with copyright".
"Because of the contract I had no choice. I can't say too much. I never talk about it. As far as I am concerned, it happened, it shouldn't have happened, I'm lucky I was able to get on and do something else. I was cleaning the house yesterday and I found some of the brochures, I look back and say we did some very nice stuff at the time."
Sure, but the split with A-Wear meant that Rocha was no longer carried by the Brown Thomas Group at the moment when his star was shining brightest. The mother store wouldn't stock him - still does not - so he had no outlets at all in Ireland. That decision must have sent a very strong message to other Irish designers. He can't talk. But what I see now is a man determined to never again rely on any one collaboration. "I'm in the position now where I can't ever see myself going out of business - the business has a pattern, and a very solid structure, so 10 per cent variable here or there is not going to make that much difference." Winning British Designer of the Year was the best joss of all, and by that stage, he had paid off every penny he owed. It was a point of principle.
"Success came late in my life, so I was quite lucky that it happened then because there's been so much shit flying around in my life that [now] I can handle most things and I look on it as icing on the cake." Working from Ireland keeps him out of the mainstream, which gives him the chance to be different, he believes. Does it also mean he risks being out of step? "Oh yeah, I do work in slight isolation but something interesting can come out of it."
But keeping the label going is tough. Fashion feeds off new names, and new ideas, so everyone becomes old hat sooner or later. "All the press travel in the same circle and I imagine that if they go to see all the shows, unless something interests them they are not going to write about you, so you have got to think of something to stimulate them, but at the same time you don't want to make it look silly, so it's about trying to hit the balance, between making clothes to stimulate the press so they will write about you but at the same time the clothes have to look well on [the customer].
"That is the trick."
