When Simone Rocha first introduced menswear in 2023, it was partly for the fun of it. As the kind of designer whose world-building is already so complete (even if you’ve followed Rocha’s career only glancingly, you can likely reel off a list of her design signatures), the opportunity to develop an entirely new facet of the brand came as a welcome challenge. But it was also just to meet demand. Male friends and customers had already been snapping up womenswear pieces (the bomber jackets and bejeweled Aran knits were proving to be particular hits), and after seeing the overwhelming response to the menswear from her H&M collaboration, Rocha decided she simply had to give the people what they wanted. “Seeing people wear it in real life, I knew it could become its own story—or at least a second character to sit alongside the women’s,” Rocha says.
The challenge as a designer was to give the people something they didn’t already know they wanted; luckily, that’s a challenge she’s adept at confronting. Rocha has a remarkable ability to take the prettiness and traditional femininity of her design signatures and turn the dial towards something darker and more perverse, but still desirable. So it’s been fascinating to watch her use menswear to explore the inverse: to take the building blocks of a utilitarian, traditionally masculine wardrobe—bombers, parkas, cargo pants, boxy tailoring—and inject a dose of undiluted Rocha romance, recasting them in taffeta and tinsel or sprinkling them with crystals and ribbons.
All of this is to say, it comes as little surprise to learn that two years after launching, Rocha has decided it’s time to spin her menswear off to become its own thing. While a handful of menswear looks appeared in her Aesop’s Fables-inspired fall 2025 runway show last month, she’s now releasing her full offering as a separate lookbook. In part, because the collection was so “character-driven,” Rocha explains. “We really felt the build-up of all these archetypes while we were making the collection, and at a certain point, I just thought, actually, this should be its own body of work.”
Across 30 looks, those archetypes are laid out with precision—“each look is its own little island, which I quite liked,” she said—and serve as a kind of taxonomy of Rocha’s menswear universe. There’s the fierce romantic in a rugby shirt trimmed with frills, clutching a bunch of roses, with one of Rocha’s new padlock belts—a cheeky wink to school kids kissing behind the bike sheds—around his waist. (The lurid green over-dyed wash denim, meanwhile, was an effect created to resemble grass stains—presumably a nod to the sartorial aftermath of all that frolicking.) There’s the more sensitive, scholarly type, leafing through a book in a diaphanous trench coat spliced together featuring panels of broderie anglaise and striped shirting fabric, billowing knee-length shorts just visible underneath. Then there’s the local bad boy, in a killer denim jacket with embroidery on the pockets, his ripped jeans featuring a string of pearls slung over the hip like a biker’s chain.