The Language of Flowers

Young designers are falling for the subversive power of a classic motif.

-  Olivia Laing

When I got married, I chose a dress by Simone Rocha. As a nonbinary person, I didn’t want anything conventionally feminine, but I did want a spectacular piece of clothing. The dress I picked was from the spring 2018 collection—Elizabethan in its shape, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a huge skirt. It was gothically black, covered in sprays of tiny red roses. The exaggerated shape felt sculptural, romantically androgynous, and definitely un-girly. When I took it off to dance, two friends, both gay men, took turns slipping it on.

We got married at a University of Cambridge college, in a 15th-century hall decorated with Pre-Raphaelite exuberance in the same unusual black, red, and green palette as the dress. There were heraldic roses and other botanical motifs everywhere you looked, rising up the walls and swarming across the painted ceiling. It was like entering a fantastical Eden, at once traditional and anarchic.

Flowers are often coded as sweetly feminine, especially in fashion, but their historical use is far stranger and more subversive. Before I became a writer, I trained as an herbalist, falling deep under the spell of medieval herbs, with their bewitching floral associations. Flowers had once formed a kind of secret language, an arcane code that only an adept could read. Bouquets, paintings, even dresses could carry a hidden message, by way of the humble plants they contained.