BEAUTY: Clothing--Simone Rocha at Pitti Uomo

This year's guest designer at Pitti Uomo (the twice-yearly international fashion trade show in Italy) was Simone Rocha who showed her first exclusive menswear collection...even though she has been showing menswear sprinkled into her womenswear shows for about four seasons now. So this was a wonderful opportunity for Rocha who said, "To be able to bring my vocabulary, distill it down, and refocus it in this way has been a very exciting process, and the whole experience here at Pitti has been fabulous. I’m very grateful to Pitti for having me as their guest designer."

She used Florence, the city of Pitti Uomo, as a springboard for inspiration and studied the classic 1985 Merchant and Ivory film "A Room With A View" based on E.M. Forster's novel of the same name. Soaking up the costume design of the film which takes place in the early 1900s, Rocha said, "This is my Irish man [referencing one of the characters in the book and film] and he’s arrived in Florence and become the main character." This Spring-Summer '27 collection was shown in the performance space of the Teatro della Pergola, a 17th-century opera house, and she used one of the floral prints she found in antique trunks in the theatre on ties and embroidery on garments. Indeed, Rocha was able to employ her now-standard vocabulary of lace, ruffles, bows, pleats, and the pearls and rhinestones of costume jewelry in a nice hybrid of classic UK menswear, with a curious--and cool--addition of work aprons in leather, and spiked shoes! I love this collection for the way it pushes boundaries but also, strangely, exists simultaneously within them...

https://simonerocha.com