Simone Rocha said, “So the women’s wear we saw at the show last month was centered around this disaffected newcomer.” “And we threw some menswear looks in there, about 10 looks, but what you see here is the entire collection. And, well, it’s a reflection of woman’s beauty. I wanted it to have that same feeling, innocence and ironic elegance.”
Thus the gabardine trench and short jacket with a sash detail on the front in the same fabric which was designed specifically for a young man to place flowers near a girl’s house on prom night. Transparent jackets, sometimes embroidered with flowers, were meant to imitate the wrapping of an inexpensive bouquet. Rocha’s teenage dance theme allowed him to play with the classic codes of Irish and British school uniforms: the coolest bits included PE shorts and (cotton-collared) ruffle-fringed rugby shirts in taffeta, sometimes set with pressed flower taffeta decoration, and more shorts and deconstructed tailoring in coated cotton.
A poplin shirt set with broderie anglaise frills of pillowcases featured as a bag in women’s apparel, and many of these men’s apparel pieces also included the same coded embellishments as women’s apparel. Rocha insisted, “I wanted the two categories to talk to each other, and they certainly did: You could see this guy 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 to talk to, he seemed quite the performative guy: a pretentious Simone de Beauvoir-reading Simone Rocha. The fanboy who favored older-spec point-and-shoot cameras and companion.
The pieces, which Rocha said were drawn from her Hong Kong heritage, provided a different, broader angle. These were workwear pieces in undyed denim, washed indigo denim and chintzily saccharine pink silk-satin quilting that aren’t so obvious in this show-referenced lookbook but had major hanger appeal. Inspired by the uniforms of HK postal workers, the placement of pockets, patches and rivets on their strapping-belt high-hemmed jackets made for a refreshing recipe in the well-worn workwear category. Jeans with ornate carpenter loops, but no brush pockets, were ersatz, but clearly so.
Rocha is no longer a newcomer in this category. We’ve been seeing these collections for the past few seasons, as limited-view side-stories in showrooms and during womenswear displays. Soon, surely, her handsome men’s wear will get its own, special, first runway prom. Andiamo,
