Simone Rocha Spring 2026: debutantes, dissonance and delicate defiance

With her Spring 2026 show, Simone Rocha returns to London Fashion Week to stage a vision of adolescence on edge, where vulnerability and grandeur meet in a ballroom of contradictions.

At Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London built in 1739, Simone Rocha staged her Spring 2026 collection with the kind of grandeur she loves to occupy and disturb at once. “I love putting it somewhere where it looks like it should but maybe doesn’t belong,” she explained before the show. That tension between belonging and estrangement set the tone for a season that balanced pomp with fragility, elegance with awkwardness.

Rocha drew inspiration from Girl Pictures, Justine Kurland’s 2020 book of adolescent photography, and Maureen Freely’s text My Dress Rehearsal: or How Mrs. Clarke taught Me How to Sew. Both works explore the self-consciousness of girlhood, a feeling that lingers beyond adolescence. Rocha imagined it as a debutante moment: on display, hesitant, both vulnerable and defiant.

Silhouettes expanded with panniers, bustles and hooped skirts in organza, sequins and scalloped taffeta, yet Rocha resisted perfection with skewed volumes, trailing hems and ostentatious necklaces. About a dozen menswear looks echoed the theme, wrapped in transparent florals or adorned with real lilies, evoking both fragility and display. Accessories added to this play of contrasts—pillow clutches edged in lace, eiderdown-inspired florals, a ballet–sneaker hybrid and a chaotic new Crocs iteration—undercutting the venue’s grandeur with intimacy and humor.

What emerged was a portrait of femininity in contradiction: opulent yet awkward, resilient yet tender. Or, as Rocha summed it up, “a playful perspective on femininity, with all its twists and turns.”