April 4, 2023 |
Simone Rocha is tired but happy. Her 12-year-old brand is in expansion mode and she’s just got back from Taipei, where she opened the fourth store in her burgeoning empire and a new menswear line is about to launch. For Rocha, dressing men was a missing piece of her design jigsaw.
Debuting her first men’s collection for 2023 brought together the themes that have informed her work from the beginning. “I’ve always been interested in the contrast of fragility and strength, or masculinity and femininity,” says the designer over Zoom from her studio.
Her men’s debut was presented in a co-ed show at London Fashion Week under the gloriously ornate painted ceilings of the Grand Hall at the Old Bailey, the very place where, more than a century before, suffragettes had been convicted over agitating for the vote. “For me the location is another character, it’s like another fabric to the collection,” she says. “I genuinely think about the moment you step through the door, and how you feel, to the moment the first girl or boy walks out. It always feels like a gathering and a congregation. I love bringing the collection into that as a character.”
Into this historic seat of establishment patriarchy stepped Rocha’s army. Boys and girls, dressed in a mix of tough utility chic and ravishing romance, often both extremes in the same outfit. For Rocha the weight of history in the room was a good thing. “The collection itself was very, very light, it almost felt like it was going to take flight. There were these parachute-type straps. There was this lightness-of-being to it. I wanted there to be a real weight to the room – not pull them back down but let them not escape almost.”
Menswear had been a touchstone of her women’s collections for years. A flat lace-up shoe or heavy leather biker jacket, an oversized bomber or traditionally tailored coat: these pieces tempered the hyper-femininity of her collections and gave her doll-like muses a tough, modern edge. But after ten years of producing rebellious, romantic, ethereal women’s collections, Rocha reasoned, it was time for a new chapter. “I wanted to explore masculinity itself as an identity. And the sensitivity that maybe I could bring to that by really exploring this idea of the relationship between the men’s collection and the women’s.”
We’d had a glimpse of what Rocha menswear could look like in 2021, with her H&M capsule collaboration. Its pearl-strewn Aran jumpers and sheer T-shirts brought a surprising delicacy to the menswear arena that also worked at retail. “It really was an eye-opener. We could really see that there was this big community and a demand for it. But that also gave me the confidence to launch it,” she reflects.
Her timing was right. Attitudes have morphed and fashion is no longer as strictly gendered as it once was. “There’s so much crossover between gender. I think it has been broken down. I feel that, today, it’s completely crossed over and the narrative has changed. The real highlight is that people are people, people are human. That means you can be a woman who feels comfortable with their masculinity and you can be a man that feels comfortable with their sensitivity or femininity. I think that is the dialogue today.”
It’s also the reality of her customers and how they shop. “Already we have lots of male customers buying our womenswear,” she says. At her stores in London, New York, Hong Kong and now Taipei, and in stockists like Dover Street Market, they are shopping, “everything from dresses to shirts to knitwear. And the pearl jewellery is completely both genders.” She expects women to shop the new menswear, too, and started designing both collections at the same time, “so they have the same narrative”, which was woven around the idea of harnessing emotion. She sees the two sides of her label as being in constant dialogue with each other. “The functionality and the strictness of the men’s did feed into the women’s because we designed it all in the same studio. The clothes always had to be in a conversation with one another.” Rocha describes the process of designing menswear as being akin to reverse engineering, taking those men’s pieces that had always informed her womenswear and bringing them back to men in a new way. “We were looking at how we actually go back to the original references of this masculine tailoring that we took to a feminine place, but actually how do they have their own masculinity, yet keep their sensitivity?”
The designer answered that question with such vivid certainty it felt like menswear had always been a part of her world. Rocha’s boys wear oversized flight jackets and ruched petticoat skirts over tailored trousers. They stride out in pearl-fastening mary janes and carry her signature pearl-shaped bags. Their trackpants come in pale silk brocade and are paired with pearl- embellished babydolls. They wear tailored jackets that can be adjusted by parachute tapes and white shirts, cascading with scrunched rosettes of fabric. Their sheer shirts and dresses and tough trench coats come embroidered with graphic red flowers.
Rocha’s signature embellishment felt disruptive of a traditional menswear narrative, supercharging the modernity of her pieces. “It almost became like our label on the men’s,” she says of the pearls that are a byword for her sense of whimsical romance and have taken on a new significance for men. But just as the women’s collection has brought a frisson to the menswear, the new men’s aesthetic has also played into her womenswear. “The technical and ergonomic side of the men’s influenced the women’s this time,” she says of her new direction. Ultimately, for all the soaring beauty of her work, Rocha wants it to feel grounded. “There has always been a reality; for me, it’s never a fantasy. It’s always grounded in today. I’ve always seen clothes as security and a uniformity. I’ve always seen them in that way because it’s something that you’re putting on your body, the reflection of yourself when you have to put yourself out there.”
Rocha doesn’t have a single male muse, although the actor Paul Mescal and the poet James Massiah were the first to appear in it. “I think masculinity is so broad and so complex. It’s very difficult to put it into one person as a muse. I’ve actually never designed like that.” Instead, she thinks in terms of character and storytelling, which allows her to build and develop the looks as she goes along. “It’s fabulous when all types of different personalities connect to it. And then you can see the diverse range of people who can feel a part of it.”
It all feeds into her fiercely independent approach, which has seen Rocha grow her business her own way, at her own pace, building a cult following and consistently punching above her weight on the cultural stage. It comes as no surprise to hear that her fashion business idols are Rei Kawakubo, the high priestess of avant-garde individualism (remember the bag she wore emblazoned with the slogan “My Energy Comes From Freedom”?), and Rick Owens, another titan of independence. Owenscorp and the Comme des Garçons empire have proved there is another way to attain success and satisfaction in fashion that doesn’t involve selling out to big conglomerates. “I admire Rick so much, and admire the ethos of doing it independently and doing it your way, in a way that can work for you. And then to still be in the international global conversation against up against all these huge heavyweights with unlimited resources.” Rocha more than holds her own on the international stage. She’s the small brand with a big voice and an even bigger future.
Taken from Issue 57 of 10 Men – NEW, DAILY, UNIFORM – out now. Order your copy here.
SIMONE ROCHA: FRAGILITY & STRENGTH
Photographer JIMI FRANKLIN
Fashion Editor CORNELIUS LAFAYETTE
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Models AIDA and DA’ANI JETTON at Kollektiv Management, ARIFA and SLIM STEVENS at Ricky Michiels Management, MI’JON WESLEY, RYU AGUILAR and KHRIS JASPER at Next Models
Hair CHIKA using Oribe
Make-up SENA MURAHASHI using Mac Cosmetics
Photographer’s assistant JAE KIM
Fashion assistant CHERNISSE BUTCHER
Make-up assistant SHIORI
