Rocco Ritchie
An evening at the studio of the young artist with a unique family life and a knack for all things excellent
At 18 years of age, Rocco Ritchie took a job as an apprentice cutter at the Savile Row tailor Chittleborough & Morgan. “This was my side job, almost,” he says. Rocco didn’t like school but understood intuitively how to wear clothes. The appointment made sense. “I was just out of high school and had just gone into Central Saint Martins.” He turned up for his first day at art school in a three-piece suit and tie. “I wanted people to take me more seriously, to think of me more as a man than a delinquent teenager. I felt quite embarrassed to say I was a painter, an artist. It felt a lot cooler to say I was a trainee tailor.”
From Fantastic Man n° 40 – 2025
Text by PAUL FLYNN
Photography by OLIVER HADLEE PEARCH
Styling by JODIE BARNES
Roy Chittleborough and Joe Morgan began their tailoring story under the stewardship of a visionary menswear designer, the bold, treasured and charismatic Tommy Nutter. “I had access to all the books, all this knowledge,” says Rocco. “Now it’s completely forgotten, but there were so many niche things. Sartorial dos and don’ts. What was bad, what was good, how you matched what with what. This endless cornucopia of knowledge.” Nutter’s London of the ’60s and ’70s appealed to Rocco. “There were a whole underworld of characters I would never have known otherwise. It taught me a lot about fabric, how to wear clothes, which I think most people need. That’s where menswear opened up to me. That took me into the sartorial.”
Rocco Ritchie is one of those handsome, lucky young men you notice on the London streets for his intuitive grasp of a good look. His style is like that of a young baron who has nipped down from his ancestral Scottish castle to do a Saturday shift at the Soho Aries store. His central menswear touchstone is the Armani of Richard Gere’s ‘American Gigolo’. Today, Rocco is wearing mostly chocolate brown: a hip-length shearling, a snug beanie and a crew-neck. His vintage Gucci horse-bit loafers are comfortably worn in, offset by the one splash of colour breaking up his otherwise nicely sludgy, wintry palette: a pair of royal blue socks bought in Japan. The composition of his face is such a mysteriously intoxicating blend of his mother, Madonna, and his father, Guy Ritchie, that it is all but impossible to pick out the gradients of where one begins and the other ends. As an artist, he has recently learned to make himself (and the autobiography he only partly owns) his best and chosen subject.
Rocco is part of a group of funny, likeable characters who met skateboarding on the South Bank in their early teens. It was there that he mixed with others on the basis of their taste, not their class. “I mean, how much fun are upper-class people? Not that much fun,” he says. “Straight away, I was, like, ‘This is the place.’ I was 15. It all went downhill from there.” He laughs. “Best years of my life.”
Rocco’s generation of London youth has navigated the intersection between boyhood and adulthood partly just by looking preternaturally fantastic at good parties. But there were deeper lessons learned on the South Bank too. “How do you develop character when the tools to do that have been robbed from you? I feel like you develop it when you have to go get something. When people give it to you, they’ve just robbed you of that experience.” He first identified his own hunger to create on those ramps. “Great artists are humans who have really gone to get it. Whether that be my mum, whether that be Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart. They went for it and got it. Nothing against people who haven’t, but it shows a certain calibre of character.”
It’s two weeks before Christmas and we’re sitting in a cosy if indistinct pub in west London, a hop, skip and a jump from his artist’s studio. Rocco would like to show Fantastic Man around the studio but has forgotten the keys, so we must wait for his agent, Jessica Draper, who is joining us after a driving test. Rocco is a little jet-lagged, just back from a Thanksgiving trip to New York to see his maternal grandfather, Silvio Ciccone, a man Rocco says could easily sit on the cast list of a Scorsese film or a remake of ‘The Sopranos’. “He’s gangster,” he notes approvingly.
“In my own opinion, I think Savile Row is a dying situation,” he says, taking a bite of a delicious-looking sausage roll. Now 24, he has enough wisdom to warrant some tentative first steps into the world of publicity. He twins this piece of observational gold with a sweet acknowledgment of his potential naivety. He has a habit of chastising himself with the corrective “But who am I to say?” Who, indeed. “It’s a really hard thing to sell in this day and age,” he continues, meaning Savile Row. “It’s expensive and it takes a really long time. Do you really want to go and spend £5,000 on a suit that takes eight fittings and will be ready in a year?”
When he started his apprenticeship at Chittleborough, he read up on Tommy Nutter. “And the stories,” he laughs. “The things they would have going on in the shop. Theparties. I think they were selling something more, something different than just menswear.” He chews the word around in his mouth a little. “Menswear…menswear…hmmm.” It sounds like a question is forming in his mind. “I don’t even want to give that word the power it has. It’s so different than what it used to mean. I always see, on Instagram, people popping up and saying ‘This is my outfit!’ People do really like to show what they’re buying and how they’re dressing. First of all, who cares? Second of all, this is shit. I mean, who am I to judge? But…”
Also, who are you not to, if someone has put themselves on socials specifically for judgment? “Basically. There’s also a difference between someone walking in a room and you going, ‘Whoa, who’s this swaggerer over here?’ or they walk in the room and go, ‘What are you wearing?’ I feel like it’s a very thin line, a very not-distinct line. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a little shit, but most men do not dress well.”
Jessica arrives and we take a short wander down the road. Within half an hour’s brief pub chatter and half a pint of diet cola, it has become apparent that what Rocco Ritchie is most interested in is the pursuit of excellence. He has no problem with name-checking some of the biggest artists of the 20th century as core inspirations. (Legendary post-war figurative painters such as Frank Auerbach, Paula Rego, David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon all come up in conversation.) “Well, you know, you’ve got to look at the big boys. You’ve got to set your standards pretty high. These are the best British artists of the 20th century in my opinion, and I think of them so often,” he says.
He has shown his artwork six times now. ‘Lovers and Enemies’, his first London exhibition, was curated by Lucian Freud’s old studio manager, David Dawson. His first show with Draper, last April in Miami, was ‘Pack a Punch’, inspired by a group of Muay Thai boxers who excited Rocco. He presented ten large charcoal works on canvas filled with tussling figures and twisted limbs. For his latest, ‘The Tourist’, at 78Temple in Paris, he showed 16 paintings based on the paparazzi photography that has intruded in and shaped much of his life. It also marked the first time that he ventured into painting landscapes. The show sold out before it opened. “Which took some of the pressure off,” he says. “But still.”
As we settle on a deflated settee in his studio – an icy-cold square room with a mezzanine bed and a framed pair of paint-daubed work overalls hung on the wall – Rocco explains that delving into his own backstory for work has left him in a curious place on the nepo baby spectrum. “I always think it’s funny,” he says, “that back in the day, some of the most beautiful cathedrals that were ever built would be built by generation after generation of the same family.” He pauses. “And now, if you are born from a family – and I’m not saying this is wrong – you start looking at nepo babies and they are not the most interesting bunch, are they?”
For Rocco, making art about his life constitutes wrestling back his story from a media that took it and told it without asking permission. For ‘The Tourist’ he recreated some old paparazzi shots of his childhood and teenage years. “I remembered that feeling when I saw those articles come out. I remember the exact moment each article came out. What I was doing. Fuck. This is out there for the rest of my life.” A whole visual archive had built up around Rocco without his invitation. Painting it all out in this studio was a satisfying experience. “It felt like therapy for me. It was my story, basically, from how I saw it.” More recently, Rocco has been spending time in Portugal, renting a house in the seaside village of Carvalhal. He says he went there “to think about life and paint. Which I did a lot of – maybe too much.” The time away pushed him outside his London comfort zone and has given him direction on what he wants to do for his next show. It’s still too early for specifics, but he’s aiming for something in the spring.
At the interview for his foundation course at Saint Martins a tutor critiqued Rocco’s style of painting. “He was very intense and kept on banging on about how all my paintings were very masculine.” All Rocco wanted to do was to learn how to draw and paint, to gain the motor skills to express his ideas. “I think he was trying to say that it was vulgar. And I didn’t think it was vulgar. I was 18, doing shitty figurative paintings; my work wasn’t even developed enough for anyone to have opinions on it back then.” He remembers his first day. “I turned up with paintbrushes in my three-piece suit, and I instantly understood that I was not in the right place.”
He lasted a year, but he found some positives in the experience. “It helped me figure out what I didn’t want, which was conceptual, and what I did want, which was practical and technical.” Because of his parents, Rocco has a high watermark of creativity to live up to. “My mum tells me stories about Basquiat and Keith Haring. I had a vision of what art school was – from films, from looking at Francis Bacon in his studio, from thinking of another time and era, which obviously I’m glorifying – but it didn’t feel cutting-edge. It felt robotic. So I had to find my own thing.”
The Royal Drawing School in Shoreditch was a quick google search away. “There, all my dreams came true,” he says, beaming. “It’s in your neck of the woods – Charlotte Road, just off Old Street. There’s that pub, literally two doors away.” He means the Bricklayer’s Arms, the boozer in which the British art world last congregated for a moment of global triumph: it is known for watering and feeding the YBAs. “I just needed a school that would teach me to draw and paint. I went in, did a trial day. They were so fucking good in there. I thought, ‘I have got to come here.’ I signed up, went in and spent basically a year and a half, seven hours a day, just drawing. They didn’t ask for homework. You just shut up and draw. Wow.” Now painting is something he intends to do forever. “Growing up never stops, does it? Every day you wake up and think, ‘Who am I?’”
Rocco’s search for excellence and obsession with painting means he has trouble locating his more everyday interests. “I’m not a football fan,” he qualifies.
Snooker?
He laughs. “Going to the pub?” he offers.
What about pop music? Does he like Sabrina Carpenter?
“Er…”
McDonald’s?
“Not really. I never understood McDonald’s. If you want a bit of a dirty meal, I can think of so many burger and fries places. Listen, I’ve had plenty of McD’s in my life. But it’s, like, fine. It’s average. Shake Shack? Banging.”
Do you watch reality TV?
“Not even! My mum would have a heart attack. My sister watches all sorts. I don’t know. I hate to sound like a fucking snob, but I’m…”
“You’re discerning,” says Jessica, looking up from her phone.
It’s a good word for Rocco Ritchie, the London kid with the weight of some heavy ancestry on his shoulders, who’s making surprisingly light of it as he dips a tentative foot into the spotlight to promote his art. “I will always be in something of a – not a spotlight,” he says, “but if you put my name into the internet and google me then you can basically figure everything out about me. Because it’s so out there, you have to find a way of how to process that. If you’re not going to tell your story, then someone else will. I’m not sure how I feel about someone else telling my story.” He smiles. We step out into the night, and Rocco Ritchie jumps on a Lime bike to go see his dad. “In fact, I know exactly how I feel about someone else telling my story. And it’s not good.”
Photographic assistance by Albi Gualtieri, Abena Appiah, Sam Singer and Bella Sporle. Styling assistance by Antoni Jankowski. Grooming by Matt Mulhall at Streeters. Production by Partner Films.