Simone Rocha Has Entered Her “Hardcore” Era

Four days after her runway show, Rocha rings me up on Zoom from her London home, wearing a gingham blouse and her hair lobbed up in her signature ribboned topknot. She looks as lovely has ever but she promises with a devilish smirk that she is entering what she calls her “hardcore” era, bringing ergonomic function and transformative grace to everything she makes.

“I’ve always felt like what I do is so specific and so natural to me. I used to think it’s not for everyone—and I’ve always been very at home in that idea—but it has been really enamoring seeing the breadth of people that can be pulled in,” Rocha says.

Simone standom stretches far and wide, and in the days after her charged Spring 2023 catwalk, the praise for her tour de force collection came from all ends.

“LOVE SIMONE,” DMed the prime minister of New York cool, Luar’s Raul Lopez.

“I think Simone’s clothes make you feel beautiful and protected and proudly on display all at once, and I can’t think of another designer who really does that!” texted Rachel Tashjian, the fashion news director of Harper’s Bazaar and sartorial connoisseur behind the exclusive newsletter Opulent Tips.

Quil Lemons, the impeccably styled photographer, messaged, “Simone Rocha is for the girls that understand that fashion and wearing her clothing feels like romance with femininity and self-love.”

Back on Zoom, Rocha smiles when she hears of the reception to her work. “People have been texting me, too, really unexpected people,” she says. “The collection is becoming much larger than me.”

Larger than Rocha, yes, but crucially still of her essence. “It’s always coming from such a natural, human, emotional place—and there’s nothing to say that can’t tip into masculinity as well as femininity. It just felt like it was the right time. To me, it’s not really about men’s or women’s but about the relationship between the two poles.”

The relationship as it played out on the runway in London’s Old Bailey courthouse is a push-pull of freedom and rigor, where floral fabrics are stuffed and suffocated under nude mesh bustiers and army-drab bomber jackets are worn with rugged nylon trousers latticed with zippers. The decision to launch men’s, she says enigmatically, “just felt right,” but if a glance at Rocha’s peers is any indication, the lines of gendered dress are being quickly erased. Molly Goddard’s menswear launch one year earlier provided fashion with its most beloved kilt, which was worn eagerly by all genders, while Chopova Lowena’s London Fashion Week debut just days before Rocha’s show included models across the spectrum of gender because “we just make clothes for people,” codesigner Laura Lowena-Irons told Vogue’s Sarah Mower.

For Rocha, introducing menswear was less about following the fashion rules than it was about invigorating a new energy within herself. “I felt really stimulated to look at things in a technical way, and so as we approached menswear we brought that technical[ity] and seriousness into all of the design. That’s where this whole almost militant uniformity was originally sparked from: very strict rules and playing with boundaries. It felt very natural,” Rocha says.

(Longtime fans will remember her debut catwalk in 2011 under the banner of Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East was, in fact, sheer and spongy suiting, barely a skirt or dress in sight. And when she came out to take her bow she was wearing…a blazer!)

On the womenswear side, Rocha’s harnessed dresses aren’t just for show. Each is suspended from its straps, able to be scrunched up shorter or released to a maxi length. “It’s quite ergonomic,” she smirks. (Ergonomic! Like a Rocha for your standing desk!) “I really wanted the pieces to feel physically there and really present. For that, they had to be touched by humans to do what they needed to do: to perform their function,” Rocha says. “It’s hard to tell in the show, where they are put to a certain length for the runway, but all the dresses really do transform quite well.” (One of Rocha’s highest spending private clients messages me days later, during her personal shopping appointment, with videos of the dresses morphing and three simple words: “Oh My God.”)

That’s the ultimate Simone Rocha secret: The underpinning of all the verve and harried fantasy is, in fact, a measured, cool calculus. “We are scientific,” she declares. “We are meticulous and we do much preparation.” With stylist Robbie Spencer, hairstylist Cyndia Harvey, and makeup artist Thomas de Kluyver, Rocha coordinates and executes each look down to the color of the glitter rimming under each model’s eyes. Nothing is left to chance. The curl of the black lacquered Olive Oyl hair—exact, tested over weeks before the show. The position of the acetate egg bag, a pearlescent, rigid orb suspended by a white beaded chain, in the crook of an arm, perfected by studying the ways real Simone Rocha customers cradle theirs. The heel height of a new Mary Jane pump: Wear-tested on the London streets. All this beauty is rooted in a precise physiology.

It’s here, in the razor-sharp efficacy of her design and her business, that Rocha not only thrives, but is developing her new formula for the future. “The two previous collections were much more of a personal narrative, about having my second baby and then the narrative of children and escapism. They were both two very dark shows and I saw them quite as two chapters in one volume, whereas this show felt like starting a new volume,” she says. “I do feel more hardcore—and I feel quite ready to take on another challenge, actually. I’d love to do something potentially more technical again. Something very visceral and feral.”

After the Spring 2023 show, Rocha and her beauties walked a mile to a nearby pub with Guinness on tap that is lorded over by a black cat that wears a white Elizabethan ruff—“Simone in cat form,” one friend cheered—to snack and celebrate. (This writer, very responsibly, left by 8:30 p.m.) “Well, I’m mortified to say,” Rocha begins with her broad Irish laugh, “that after the pub people were leaving my house at 3:00 a.m. I did not stay up the whole night, but everyone celebrated on my behalf. Next year, I don’t think we can go back to my home.” She laughs brightly again. “But it was really good. I loved seeing that as well: Everyone in the pub with their pints of Guinness and all the pearl bags. So good.” With that, she hangs up the call and heads off to see her friends’ post-punk band, The Murder Capital, perform in London. Underneath the tulle, a hardcore heart beats.