(Continued) accomplished architect. “My mother loved clothes and was a very compulsive buyer.” He recalls as we chat on his beautiful cliff-side balcony that overlooks Bahía de Banderas (Banderas Bay). “She also could sew very well.” He continues. “My father, being an architect, had a very keen eye for things. He was very precise with colors, in the aesthetics, and with proportions. He was a true perfectionist, and hence where I got my aesthetics for fashion.”
A transforming moment for him would come at 8 years old when he saw the American movie “Mahogany” that starred Diana Ross. In the film, Ross played a struggling Chicago fashion design student who goes from rags to riches when she has a chance encounter with a hotshot fashion photographer while working inside a department store that leads to life as an international high fashion model. “When I see that movie and see all that… the fashion life, Paris, Rome, Florence… I immediately fell in love with that world and wanted to live in it.” He remembers. “School did not interest me and I began failing. I knew myself and realized that I could never be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect, or anything like that. I knew my passion was for design and fashion, and the area where I lived was surrounded with clothing factories. So I quit school and then shortly after I opened several clothing stores.” Rocha would take his keen eye for style and travel to fashion centers in the USA, such as New York and Dallas, as well as buy clothes from local Mexican designers to stock his stores. Then as the fashion boom of the mid and late 80’s hit, he decided to design and produce his own clothes for his stores. He moved his operation to the more industrialized city of Torreon Mexico where he would be able to mass produce his garments and Edoardo Rocha Designs was born.
It wasn’t long before he would gain recognition as he presented his first (Continued pg 39)