Simone Rocha Fall 2025 Menswear

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.

Despite the whimsical backstories the looks hint at, when you see the pieces in isolation, you notice they’re actually rather down-to-earth. “When we were discussing the collection and we felt all the product, we decided we really wanted to… I know this sounds like a cliché, but we were really focusing on the clothes.” Zoom in a little, and that checks out: from shirting to socks, sneakers to tailoring, every building block of a complete men’s wardrobe is represented somewhere. The star of the show, however, is the outerwear, whether a motorcycle jacket lengthened to fall below the knee for “a kind of serial killer emo feeling,” a flight jacket in a deliciously tactile Nappa leather as rich and supple as melted chocolate, or a fabulous wool-bonded neoprene duffel in navy with a smattering of black crystal embellishments around the hood and neck.

The numbers speak for themselves: you could suggest that Rocha’s increasing emphasis on menswear is for commercial reasons as much as creative, given sales of the category have more than doubled since its introduction in 2023. Meanwhile, the arena in which Rocha’s menswear has arguably seen the greatest success is on the red carpet, where it’s been worn by Andrew Scott, Eddie Redmayne, and, perhaps most notably, her fellow countryman Paul Mescal. It’s hard not to see many of the current men’s formalwear trends—whether the ubiquity of dazzling brooches pinned to suit lapels, or the blazer-skirt combo—as having been helped along a little by Rocha. “I’m surprised at how well it translates to the red carpet, because that’s never really what I’m thinking about as a designer when I’m working on the collection,” she said. “But I like that it’s given guys a bit more license to explore their own sensitivity or femininity in how they dress.”

Arguably Rocha’s most interesting—and effective—ambassadors are the Irish rockers Fontaines D.C., who are close friends of hers and have a sharp eye for styling her pieces with vintage looks and streetwear, grounding them in a grungier, but more obviously wearable reality. It’s a reminder that Rocha’s success isn’t just about facts and figures, but the depth of feeling that radiates from her clothes. There’s a reason why “community” is a word you hear bandied around Rocha so often. “It’s just brilliant when you see people wearing it in real life, and wearing it in their own way,” she says, with a glowing smile. “There’s no bigger compliment really.”