Simone Rocha has all the time been a world-builder. Since launching her eponymous label in 2010, the Irish designer has populated her explicit universe with pearls and perspex, Catholic iconography and folkloric heroines, debutantes, dolls, and garments each devotional and danger-inflected. However in crafting this evocative universe, for Rocha, has by no means meant sealing its borders.
Collaboration has repeatedly provided a technique to open up the oyster of Simone Rocha and unleash the pearls. An early partnership with J. Model noticed her transpose the ruffles and saturated colours into denim, studying about washes and dyeing within the course of. In 2024, she entered Jean Paul Gaultier’s archive as the home’s visitor couturier, describing the expertise to Vogue as an opportunity “to see what your spirit does in response.” And this June, one other growth: her first standalone menswear show, staged as Pitti Uomo’s visitor designer in Florence, the place she described it as “a brand new chapter in my work and world.”
The most effective collaborations, she tells Vogue from her east London studio, end in one thing that “both get together couldn’t produce like the opposite.”
“I like to take individuals without warning and be like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t anticipating that, however in fact I completely see that.’ That’s once I assume one thing can really feel magical,” Rocha says.
Which brings us to adidas, and the start of a long-term partnership between adidas Originals and Simone Rocha. The primary collaboration was revealed on the designer’s fall 2026 show contained in the cavernous, regal Alexandra Palace throughout London Style Week in February. The gathering interweaved sensuous concepts: the traditional Gaelic story of everlasting youth and romance within the mythological story Tír na nÓg, with Perry Ogden’s 1999 photographic sequence Pony Youngsters, the place youths from Dublin’s housing estates trip horses in a mixture of equestrian gear and well-loved sports activities kits. This was articulated in signature sporty adidas silhouettes transmutated by way of Rocha’s smooth, female lens: lace-layered and ruffle-fronted monitor pants, diamanté and pearl-studded soccer socks, broderie anglaise draping baggage.
Confronted with the significantly bigger universe of the Three Stripes, Rocha discovered herself asking a characteristically particular query: “Adidas is only a massive universe. So I’m form of like: ‘What’s our planet?’” Right here, completely on Vogue, the fuller image unfurls: photographed by Justine Kurland in a single dreamy tableau. The complete assortment will launch September 10 globally.
Because it seems, Rocha had been dressing for that airplane since she was a youngster. There are generations of Irish schoolgirls who comprehend it effectively, too. “I used to put on adidas beneath my college skirt,” the designer remembers. Later, in school, the mixture developed into one thing a lot nearer to the visible language she would finally construct a vogue home round: classic petticoats and previous tutus worn with adidas Three Stripes soccer shorts beneath. “I had a purple Firebird with black stripes that I cherished,” she says. “I all the time appreciated the way it grounded the femininity that got here very naturally to the best way I dressed.”
