If fashion traffics in fantasy, Rocha is a modern-day Tolkien (just with fewer orcs and more sad princes). But fantasy has to live in some sort of reality; if luxury fashion doesn’t sell, there’s no future. Right now, Simone Rocha is selling – and not just to hardcore fashion types, but regular guys who want to look good. According to market research group Euromonitor, luxury menswear accounted for £30 billion of the global market in 2022 – an 11 per cent increase on the previous year. And now, when men’s fashion continues to weird out in the best possible way, Rocha’s menswear couldn’t have come at a better time. “This is what our customer is currently searching for,” says Bosse Myhr, Selfridges’ director of menswear. “It’s encouraging our customers to rethink what traditional menswear is.”
Rocha’s growing fandom isn’t confined to one place either. Although she’s routinely labelled a “cult” designer, her followers are global. So I DMed them on Instagram. Courtney, a retail specialist based in New York, came across the brand in 2017. “I appreciate the way it blends elements of both femininity and masculinity,” he tells me over email. “My first purchase was some black cargo pants with zip detailing. It gives genie vibes.” Caesar, a stylist, also points to the mix of “feminine and masculine energy” and how a camp-collar corded lace shirt allows him “to express [his] inner queen.”
Just over 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, Nathan bought in when the menswear dropped – and admires the fact Simone Rocha still feels a little analogue. “When it hit the online retailers, it just had an instant impact on me. I knew I had to buy into the brand,” he says. “It just feels like she knows how to make good clothes and her fans are authentic. There’s minimal influencer marketing involved.” And Hank from Gulf Shores, Alabama, summed up the vibe most succinctly via WhatsApp voice note: “If I was going to be beheaded, like back in the day, I’d want to be wearing Simone Rocha lace and pearls.”
Time and again, Rocha’s boys come back to the romance of her work: the ruffles, the fabrics, the grimmer side of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. The menswear is, in essence, a direct reflection of the womenswear on which the brand was built. “The words that have been used to describe my work, like romantic, or feminine, or emotional, they’re all words that can apply to a man,” Rocha says.
“The fact that men were buying the womenswear allowed Simone to be more playful when taking on the traditional masculine codes of tailoring,” says Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council. She has seen the designer grow from young acolyte to full cult leader. “You can be a strong man and wear these collections to show your sensitive side. Maybe that’s part of the charm: it’s about attitude, whether it’s male or female, but knowing that everyone has a sensitive side. Simone Rocha has a way of showing that.”
It’s too simplistic to see her label as a creation of all things coquettish, too. There’s a distinct dark side to Rocha’s sunny disposition. She gleefully recounts her summer spent in a 16th-century cottage on Dartmoor (“no phone signal, yaaaaaas!”) with her girls and her “fella”, cinematographer Eoin McLoughlin. “I’m having a big 1500s moment right now. I’m deep in this novel where it opens with this strange, spooky man and his wife.” (When I ask what happens, she tilts her hand, raising it theatrically to her chest. “Well, he murders her.”) Rocha talks about Queen Victoria’s mourning dress that lays in rest at Hampton Court Palace. She listens to the hypnotic warbles and drones of Lankum, an Irish folk band that performed at her AW23 show. She talks about Dublin, how you always bump into someone you know at the top of the street, about its sense of community, about its diaspora and how they support one another. “Paul Mescal’s worn a few of our pieces,” she says. “Irish people are like magnets, we stick together. Him, and Barry Keoghan, and my friends in [post-punk band] Fontaines DC: there are all these amazing Irish lads and women who are doing amazing stuff.”
