Simone Rocha doesn’t just design clothes, she stages gestures. For the Spring/Summer 2026 season the London-based designer leaned into the awkward, the playful, the bittersweet, delivering a collection that felt like a love letter to imperfection, romance, and raw girlhood energy.
The press notes read cryptic as ever “a gesture, a playful provocative stance, an awkward moment” which is exactly what we saw. The show opened with delicate tiny flower organza layered over crinolines, immediately setting the tone: fragile but structured, romantic yet unsettling. From there, Rocha’s signatures collided with subversions: a silver sequin trapeze dress shimmering with childlike glee, pressed satin flowers scalloped across taffeta, Venetian wool sleeves draped like a painter’s brushstroke.
A sense of trapped beauty ran through the collection; dresses in blush and baby blue vinyl looked like pressed flowers under glass, while quilted coats and twinsets wrapped the body like protective eiderdowns. At times, garments appeared peeled back or cut away, exposing underpinnings, as if catching the models mid–dress rehearsal — a nod, perhaps, to Maureen Freely’s memoir cited in the notes.
Florals, of course, bloomed everywhere: brocade bouquets, red rose shorts, embroidered poppies, daisies sealed into vinyl. But they weren’t just decorative, they were distorted, pressed, and manipulated, like flowers from the corner shop preserved beyond their natural lifespan.
The tension between delicacy and defiance was heightened with menswear — sharp Venetian wool tailoring softened by long fresh stems of lilies thread into Harrington jackets and a single-breasted suit punctuated with a silk blossom. Rocha’s world remains unisex, romantic but never saccharine.
Accessories added to the surreal theatre: pillowcase bags, leather petal hats, and ballerina platforms embellished into sculptural statements. Even gloves and bustles were sequinned into talismans of femininity refracted.
By the finale, the collection felt less like a straightforward season and more like an atmosphere: at once tender and uncomfortable, dreamy and disruptive.
Explore the full runway looks below.
