By Seth Khouri
“I’m hoping it will feel like a big visceral feast,” Simone Rocha shared ahead of her AW26 offering. This presents as a curious phrase, one that conjures excess, indulgence, even abandon. And yet, as the cascade of models made their descent, it became clear that Rocha’s idea of feasting is never gluttonous; it is emotional, textural, and myth all in one.
This season, her point of departure was Enbarr, the white horse of Irish folklore said to carry heroes across the sea to Tir na nÓg, the land of eternal youth. Rocha has long mined femininity through the lens of girlhood and memory; here, she sharpened that instinct against the mysticism of home. The result was a sixty-look procession that felt both romantic yet faintly feral.
The palette drew from the brooding canvases of Jack B. Yeats, whose paintings of Tir na nÓg pulse with movement and shadow. Smoky charcoals, moss greens, bruised creams and inky blacks washed across chiffon and wool alike. Where Yeats painted myth into landscape, Rocha translated it into silhouette. His sisters, Elizabeth and Lily, became muses for the collection’s womenswear and tailoring—figures refracted through Rocha’s own codes: mannish overcoats with boxy shoulders; prim tea dresses edged in tasselled ribbons; silk bows tied with deliberate sweetness. Notably, AW26 also marked Rocha’s first collaboration with Adidas. Track jackets and micro shorts, tight long-sleeve tees and athletic stripes were filtered through her romantic lexicon.
The show opened in near-whisper. Two sheer chiffon dresses floated out in succession, spectral twins. The first was delicately embroidered with floral appliqué, petals scattered like pressed keepsakes. The second subverted its sibling; embroidery replaced by spindly silk ribbons, the transparency interrupted by sharp ivory trim. Beneath, charcoal micro-shorts grounded the look in something decidedly contemporary. Rocha’s eternal youth, it seems, is not naïve, it is knowingly exposed. Throughout, contrasts did the heavy lifting. Shearling aviator jackets brushed against floral jacquards; khaki bombers toughened voluminous skirts, here, hard met soft. Even the menswear—double-breasted blazers, workwear shirts, checkered button-downs—refused to sit obediently within traditional confines. Tucked into wool skirts or layered beneath diaphanous fabrics, they provided fleeting moments of subversion, destabilising any fixed notion of masculinity or femininity.
If Enbarr promises passage to eternal youth, Rocha’s interpretation suggested something more complex: youth as a place both fragile and defiant, suspended between myth and modernity. A feast, yes—but one layered with memory, melancholy, and the quiet thrill of transformation.
