“So the womenswear we saw at the show last month was around this disgruntled debutante,” said Simone Rocha. “And we put some menswear looks in there, about 10 looks, but what you see here is the full collection. And, well, it’s a counterpart— kind of the beau—of the woman. I wanted it to have the same feeling, naivete, and ironic elegance.”
Thus the gabardine trench and shorter jacket in the same fabric with a sashed detail at the front that was specifically designed for a young man to place flowers in while approaching a girl’s house on prom night. The transparent jackets, sometimes etched with florals, were there to mimic the wrapping of a cheap bouquet. Rocha’s teenage dance theme allowed her to play with classic codes of Irish and British school uniform: the best bits included the PE shorts and (cotton-collared) ruffle-fringed rugby shirts in taffeta, sometimes set with pressed-flower taffeta decorations, and more shorts and deconstructed tailoring in coated cotton.
A poplin shirt was set with broderie anglaise frills of the pillowcase that featured as a bag in womenswear, and many of these menswear pieces also featured the same codified embellishments as the womenswear. “I wanted both of the categories to talk to each other,” asserted Rocha, and that they surely did: You could see this boy kissing that girl at the bus stop on the way home before spending a night listening to The Cure on vinyl and journaling. Without that girl around to speak to, he looked pretty performative male: an ostentatiously Simone de Beauvoir-reading Simone Rocha fanboy who favored old-spec point-and-shoot cameras and allyship.
A different, wider angle was provided by the pieces Rocha said were drawn more from her Hong Kong heritage. These were workwear pieces in undyed denim, washed indigo denim, and chintzily saccharine pink silk-satin quilt that are not so evident in this show-contextualized lookbook but which held major hanger appeal. Inspired by HK postal workers’ uniforms, the placement of pockets, patches, and rivets on their strapping-belted high-hemmed jackets made for a fresh recipe in the well-worn workwear category. Jeans with embellished carpenter’s loops but no brush pockets were ersatz, but distinctly so.
Rocha is no longer a debutante in this category. We have been looking at these collections for a couple of seasons now, both in the showroom and as limited-look side-stories during the womenswear reveal. Soon, surely, her pretty menswear will get its own, special, first-ever runway prom. Andiamo!