Everything’s coming up roses

Why is the rose so alluring for designers and fashion lovers? “It might well be said of this flower that nature has exhausted herself in trying to lavish on it the freshness of beauty, of form, perfume, brilliancy and grace,” wrote Charlotte de la Tour in her famous 1819 book Le Langage des Fleurs. The “queen of flowers,” of course, has been prized for millennia, with the Greek writer Achilles Tatius bestowing the title in the 2nd century. It reigns supreme every Valentine’s in the Philippines, where florae were recorded in the 17th century by George Kamel, in the 18th-century expeditions of Juan de Cuellar and Alessandro Malespina, and in the 19th-century Flora de Filipinas by Fr. Manuel Blanco. 

Genus Rosa dates back 35 to 45 million years. It was first featured in a painting in the Blue Bird Fresco at the House of Frescoes in Knossos, Crete in 1,500 BCE and was cultivated in the Mediterranean countries, China and Persia, from 500 BC.

Fresh roses were worn since ancient times by the Egyptians, who lamented their absence so keenly that they made the first artificial flowers, known as permanent botanicals, from stained horn. They became popular along with the Persian concept of the paradise garden, making its way to Europe via the Romans.

The Romans’ appreciation of the rose went beyond gardens, used by varying social classes for perfume, scents, in food and wine, and for bathing. The blossom even had an extravagant annual festival of its own—the Rosalia—and was used as wreaths, garlands, and chaplets for domestic, religious, and ceremonial life. For pure decadence, the petals were used as carpeting, as seen in the 1888 Lawrence Alma-Tadema painting of guests drowning in a deluge of roses at a feast, the likes of which the emperor Nero indulged in, reportedly spending four million sesterces just for flowers.

The rose was not always well-received by Christians because of its association with lust and debauchery during the Roman Empire: Cupid was believed to have given the blossom to Harpocrates, a god who symbolized silence, in exchange for keeping the amorous affairs of his mother, Venus, a secret. This is the origin of the Latin term sub rosa, or “under the rose,” to denote secrecy in private matters like indiscretions. 

The rose later prevailed as the most perfect of flowers, one which had been without thorns until the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and the Virgin Mary was consequently represented by a white, thornless rose, which later symbolized chastity, as used in a portrait of Elizabeth I.

The red rose’s pagan links, on the other hand, represent blood and death, with its color coming from the blood of Aphrodite, who cut her feet on the thorns of a rosebush while rushing to her dying lover, Adonis. Christianity would adopt it as a symbol of Christ, with the five petals as His five bleeding wounds and the bush’s thorns as his crown.

The rose came to be associated with love, femininity, purity and death, in both art and literature. With tales like the 13th-century Le Roman dela Rose where the flower became a symbol for female sexuality, and with the term “deflower” used for the taking of virginity in 17th- and 18th-century books, the beloved flower was shunned again in England by the time of the Victorians, who found the references to sexuality utterly distasteful.

Roses, however, had already been cultivated in earnest in England and France by the end of the 18th century and was seen all over, from home décor to ornamentation for furniture and the adornment of women. Even earlier in the century, Europeans were wearing fresh and artificial roses and the rose motif was popular because of its versatility, from printing to weaving and sculpting in fabric. Roses may have been gendered feminine from the 19th century onwards, but they used to be awarded to men for heroic and virtuous acts and it was men who used rose perfume.

Designers reveled in the many associations of the blossom, from the surreal 1937 Schiaparelli gown with a Jean Cocteau image of a couple kissing beneath a vase of roses to Christian Dior’s 1947 “flower women” and Yves Saint Laurent’s 1960 dress with a pink rose on the navel.

In the ’90s, Alexander McQueen used the rose in the context of death and decay—the black rose as a symbol of melancholy and degradation—as well as for joy, like in his Sarabande SS2007 collection of sculpted dresses with fresh roses and Philip Treacy hats abundant in silk versions. When his BFF Isabella Blow took her own life, the designer entwined their names forever in a pink floribunda, which he named “Alexander’s Issie.” His twinning of a rose and a skull, drawn from Dutch Vanitas paintings which symbolized fleeting beauty and the brevity of life, turned out to be all too prescient when he later suffered the same fate as his friend. 

McQueen’s successor, Sarah Burton, was also enamored with the flower, recalling dressing as a rose in the annual festival of her North England hometown. She described her 2019 “Red Rose” dress with whorls of fabric as “lust red” in color and for spring 2024, a red dress is made to resemble a vulva—a design that would have surely shocked her Victorian forebears but a clear indication of how women, fashion and society have evolved. 

The rose has also been stripped of gender, used significantly in men’s fashion as well as gender-neutral designs. The rose has finally been liberated and can be enjoyed by all in its many permutations.