When it was announced back in March that Simone Rocha would step in as guest designer at Pitti Uomo, the obvious question was less “could she do it” than “what would it look like once she had the floor to herself.” The Irish designer has never lacked for craft or conviction; the question was always going to be one of translation, not talent.
In taking the slot, Rocha joins a guest-designer roster that runs from Giorgio Armani’s era-defining unstructured tailoring in 1979 through to Raf Simons, who has shown in Florence twice. It’s a lineage built on designers using Pitti to restate their idea of what menswear can be, and Rocha’s invitation slots her into that continuum, even as her own reference points sit closer to lace and folklore than to Armani’s louche eighties suiting.
That’s because Simone Rocha’s name has, for more than a decade, been shorthand for a particular strain of womenswear, one that takes traditionally “feminine” signifiers (pearls, broderie, baby-doll silhouettes) and pulls them somewhere stranger and more confrontational. Menswear has technically been part of the Simone Rocha offering since 2022, but always as a subplot to the main womenswear narrative, shown on the same runway. The standalone show in Florence was the first real test of whether that sensibility holds up on its own.
On the evidence of the runway, it does. The opening look set the tone: a black double-breasted blazer and matching tailored shorts, finished with pearl-detailed socks and black ballet flats. From there, the show kept pulling tailoring out of its comfort zone. Underpinnings, normally the part of an outfit nobody sees, became the point: long-johns, gingham boxer shorts and ribbed dress socks were left fully visible rather than tucked away.
A cotton poplin shirt was reworked into broderie anglaise; an embroidered jacquard motif turned up inside an otherwise straightforward Fair Isle knit. One look went furthest of all, a tiered, lace-trimmed white pinafore cinched at the waist over black trousers, less a deconstructed shirt than an apron lifted from a Victorian kitchen and reassigned to menswear. Cornflowers also recurred throughout, on bag handles, lapels, as a standalone bouquet carried down the runway, a small but consistent motif tying the collection’s turn-of-the-century English romanticism together.
The venue did some of the work, too. The Teatro Della Pergola is generally considered Italy’s oldest opera house, a 17th-century theatre that’s hosted opera and drama and, for one evening, a menswear runway. Grand, slightly haunted venues have become something of a signature for Rocha, who has previously shown at the restored Victorian theatre of Alexandra Palace, the Lord Mayor’s official residence at Mansion House and even The Old Bailey.
So, is masculinity, but make it soft a tired premise at this point? Maybe, on paper. But this didn’t read as a provocation about gender so much as the same instinct Simone Rocha has applied to womenswear for over a decade: pulling at the seams of what a category is “supposed” to look like until something more interesting falls out. On the evidence of Florence, menswear has more give in it than the rulebook suggests.
