Simone Rocha has been showing menswear as part of her womenswear collections since 2022, but this week in Florence, she gave it the stage it deserves. As the guest designer at this season's Pitti Uomo, Rocha presented her first fully standalone menswear collection at the Teatro della Pergola, Italy's oldest opera house, and the result was everything her fans had hoped for: tender, theatrical and deeply personal.
The venue was no accident. Rocha has made opulent show locations something of a calling card, from Alexandra Palace to Mansion House, and the Teatro della Pergola, with its exposed backstage and that extraordinary shaft of natural light falling across the stage through a rear window, gave the collection a Florentine warmth that a conventional catwalk could never have achieved. Behind the stage, that window to the outside, unusual in a theatre, created a luminous backdrop that Rocha described as the bright light of Florence she remembered from childhood visits.
The collection itself drew on E.M. Forster's A Room With a View, the 1985 Merchant Ivory adaptation of which provided the cornflower motif running throughout the pieces. There was something of Julian Sands' free-spirited George Emerson in the casting: boys in ruffled rugby jerseys, elongated shirts in broderie anglaise, and tailored jackets with unexpected cut-outs that scooped away the back and replaced buttons with tie fastenings that echoed apron strings. Oxford trousers were wide and easy. Underwear was not hidden but displayed: long johns, gingham boxers and dress socks worn on full view as if the getting-dressed process had been interrupted midway through.
Rocha has spoken about how splitting her collections, rather than showing them together, changed her approach to menswear. Menswear is so much more detail-orientated than womenswear, she told Wallpaper. There is really nowhere to hide with it. The collection bore that out. An embroidered jacquard motif was engineered into a Fair Isle knit. A two-button jacket had the back cut away and a tie fastening that could double as apron strings. Gladstone bags, floral garlands and organza feather boas added a sense of femininity and theatricality, but the clothes never felt costume-like. This was menswear that asked what sensitivity and poetry might look like on a male body, and answered it convincingly.
Rocha's Chinese and Irish heritage was woven throughout. She described how her maternal grandfather, a pharmacist in the Irish midlands, was always behind the camera, with very few photographs of him existing. The idea of being viewed versus being the viewer became a theme, with sheer fabrics and peek-a-boo details forcing the wearer into visibility while maintaining a sense of privacy. It was, in the end, a menswear debut that felt both inevitable and surprising: the natural next step for a designer who has always explored the space between strength and softness, now doing it on her own terms, on her own stage.
