Simone Rocha SS 2025
Simone Rocha, celebrated for her romantic yet subversive designs, continues to redefine contemporary femininity. Known for her masterful use of texture and a deft balance of toughness with delicacy, Rocha has earned accolades like the British Womenswear Designer Award 2024, and the Emerging Designer title at the British Fashion Awards. Her Spring/Summer 2025 collection, staged at The Old Bailey—London’s historic and still-operating central criminal court—was a testament to her ability to craft narratives as layered and provocative as her garments.
The Old Bailey served as a fitting venue for a show steeped in intrigue and open interpretation. Its storied walls added gravity to the collection’s themes of ambiguity and duality, mirroring the designer’s resistance to prescriptive fashion. Rocha herself remarked that she seeks to give audiences “license to interpret” her work, underscoring her commitment to personal expression over definitive statements.
Dance, specifically the work of Michael Clark and Pina Bausch, provided the central inspiration for the collection. Bausch’s Nelken, a piece exploring love’s extremes through a carnation-strewn landscape, left its floral mark across the collection. Carnations appeared in myriad forms—crystal mesh harnesses, tulle bouquet handbags, and embroidered accents on hosiery and suiting. This motif, originally a buttonhole ornament in formal menswear, became a symbol of layered meanings, from beauty and fragility to resilience.
Rocha’s exploration of the tension between the private and performative unfolded through garments that blurred boundaries. Knit ballet wrap cardigans and sliced-away woolen coats evoked dancers’ mid-rehearsal, their vulnerability amplified by incongruously formal tailoring. Tulle tutus, combined with negligees, further played with notions of intimacy and performance. In one standout look, a mint sheath dress encased in opaque tulle seemed to preserve its wearer, while another featured a black satin dress pulled open to reveal carnation-embellished undergarments—an intentional exposure of vulnerability and strength.
Menswear offered exaggerated technical silhouettes in duchesse silk, harnessed with floral embellishments, accessories like Rocha-branded denim, embellished Crocs, and ballet slippers with driving shoe soles that added playful yet subversive touches. The closing triptych of silk dresses and coats, adorned with lush bows, celebrated Rocha’s signature opulence.
The collection’s avant-garde nature lay in its refusal to present a singular narrative. By incorporating Genieve Figgis’s unsettling reinterpretations of canonical artworks, Rocha infused her designs with chaos and depth beneath polished surfaces. This message was clear: identity is multifaceted, and what we project often diverges from reality.
While the diversity of design elements dazzled, the narrowcasting unfortunately highlighted fashion’s ongoing challenges with representation. Despite this limitation, Rocha’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection emerged as a triumph of beauty, meaning, and interpretation—leaving the final verdict in the hands of its audience.
