Simone Rocha

The past and the present. Rabbits and tortoises. A bike rack. The principal’s office. A pang of school nostalgia.

It reads like a string of random words, but these are fragments pulled straight from Simone Rocha’s childhood memories.

 

Simone Rocha FW25 ⓒdazeddigital.com

Her FW25 collection is a new romantic fable, retelling “The Tortoise and the Hare.” It draws from the idea of slow yet steady growth, a reflection of her own path. Rocha has always treated fashion like a mother tongue, and this season she uses her collections to turn back the clock, replaying the journey of a girl who walked a different road.

Simone Rocha FW25 ⓒi-d.co

Everyone’s eyes landed on the rabbit. Not the metaphorical one, but the one actually sitting in the middle of the show. It immediately felt like those childhood stuffed animals that knew all your secrets. Rocha let the rabbit stand for purity and memory, but also for the way innocence is never entirely safe. It always carries fear, awkwardness, fragility. In that rabbit, she showed the ambivalence at the heart of her work on femininity.

Through FW25, the audience had no choice but to face their own younger selves.

 

Growing Up as “the Designer’s Daughter”

For Simone Rocha, fashion was not a choice, it was inheritance. Her father John Rocha, Hong Kong–born and Dublin-based, won British Designer of the Year back in 1993. To her, he was both a first teacher and a guide.

 

ⓒ@simonerocha_

 

At eleven, while classmates were still racing down slides, Simone’s playground was her father’s studio. She learned crochet, needlework, small skills that became muscle memory. By fourteen she was making socks for his runway shows, cutting patterns, sewing seams. A full assistant, minus the paycheck. Those hours of thread and fabric would later bloom as the delicate details people now associate with her collections.

 

ⓒwmagazine.com

 

The DNA was already there. After finishing her BA at Dublin’s National College of Art and Design, she debuted under her own name in London Fashion Week, September 2010. Four years later Harper’s Bazaar called her Young Designer of the Year. In 2016 she took home Womenswear Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards. Her momentum hasn’t slowed once.

 

Simone Rocha ⓒharpersbazaar.com

 

“I’m interested in femininity and masculinity. I love that what I see and feel flows straight into my collections.” – Simone Rocha

 

Finding Romance in the Everyday

Her work runs on obsession with fashion itself. The designs might look delicate, but there’s a toughness in them. In interviews she repeats the same mantra: identity is everything. For her, identity comes wrapped in a sense of romance you can never fully touch, something mysterious she refuses to compromise. That unreachable quality is what makes Simone Rocha, Simone Rocha.

 

©culturedmag

 

When asked about advice for new designers, her answer is sharp. 

Identity has to be strong, and you need to believe in it. Fashion is not a straight rail. Every designer walks their own route. From the outside it looks like one road, but the work is infinite in its paths.

 

FW23 ⓒtag-walk.com

 

Showing femininity openly today is power. Rocha is more than a maker of garments, she’s offering women an attitude of strength. Her woman is fragile and fierce, romantic and experimental. She walks with her own narrative. In Rocha’s universe, femininity is not a cage. It’s an engine.

 

FW23 ⓒsimonerocha.com

 

Ribbons, soft pastels, layers of ruffles and volume that mimic flowers in bloom.

These are the Simone Rocha signatures. They’re instantly recognizable because they come from her stubborn commitment to identity.

 

Slow and Steady

Rocha has always asked herself: how do you sneak the delicacy of womenswear into menswear? Her answer has been to break up the rigid codes with romance and mischief. Every season adds another twist to the men’s wardrobe.

 

ⓒ@simonerocha_

 

Pearl-stitched shirts fall into pleats sharp enough to pass for a school uniform, though the effect is more poetry than discipline. The belt, coiled like a bike lock, nods to the kind of kid who would rather cause trouble behind the bike shed than sit through class. Menswear in her world doesn’t march in line. It winks, bends rules, and slips romance into places it doesn’t belong.

 

ⓒsimonerocha.com

 

This season, rabbits took the lead in womenswear. In menswear, it was the tortoise that took center stage. The rabbit spoke to quick bursts of speed, while the tortoise was persistence and grit. Rocha’s menswear doesn’t get as much attention, but she keeps refining it slowly, layering her own storytelling into both lines.

 

Dark Romance Never Left

Thinking Rocha is all softness would be a mistake. She’s kept a steady hand on dark romanticism too. With her brand’s dreamy reputation, people often erase the black. Yet black has been her fantasy color from the start. It’s a bloom in the dark, a gothic punk twist, always redefined in her language.

 

FW24 ⓒtag-walk.com

 

Even with ruffles and tulle taking over the runway, black grounds her work. It holds the weight of both strength and femininity. FW24 set the stage with its gothic undertones, and FW25 picks it up again, folding the tension into her new fable.

 

FW24 ⓒtag-walk.com

 

This season the ribbon changed. No longer a sweet accent, it tightened gently at the throat, then turned into the key that loosened a coat. Corsets and ruffles that felt heavy in FW24 softened here, matching the pace of the story.

 

FW25 Backstage ⓒnovembre.global

 

In her clothes, mischief and romance, toughness and softness meet in equal measure. The result proves clothes can hold whole stories. Rocha leaves a quiet lesson as well: persistence makes things shine. Her designs, always technical and tender, practical and romantic, keep widening what a wardrobe can be.