Who is the Simone Rocha man? It’s a question the Irish designer has been quietly contending with since SS23, when she began drip-feeding menswear into her London Fashion Week collections. Even before then, the demand was always there: at most those shows you couldn’t move for the number of men draped in whimsical propositions from her womenswear. It wasn’t until AW25 that Rocha fully committed to a standalone men’s line, presented via digital lookbook and followed by a second collection for SS26. Like much of her work, the transition was made with a delicate touch. Rather than simply masculinising her own output, the clothes suggested she was starting from a kind of menswear ground zero, reassessing the tenets of men’s dress and subverting them for her own vision of masculinity, or at least the hope of what that could be.

At Pitti Uomo, that hope was realised for the very first time in the flesh, as Rocha debuted her inaugural men’s catwalk at the Florentine fashion fair. Below, we break down the show via the numbers that mattered the most – from the airmiles racked up by Rocha’s leading men to bouquets, boas, and knobbly knees.

370 YEARS

…is how long the historic Teatro della Pergola, the location for Rocha’s SS27 show, has been standing. Having occupied the same spot since 1656, it’s widely considered the oldest theatre in Italy, playing host to the country’s finest actors over the course of four centuries. But rather than have guests sit in the plush velvet seats, the designer chose to leave the stalls empty, instead transforming the stage floor into a catwalk with guests seated around its perimeter. All the world’s a stage, apparently.

4 BOUQUETS OF CORNFLOWERS

When the first model arrived on stage, he was dressed in a double-breasted Venetian wool evening jacket, with matching tailored shorts and a fresh bouquet of cornflowers clasped to his chest. As the name would suggest, cornflowers historically grew amongst cornfields, and though they were once considered a weed, they have since come to symbolise hope, delicacy and longing – in European folklore, they were associated with young men in unrequited love, which earned them the nickname ‘Bachelor’s Buttons’. The bouquets appeared three more times throughout the collection, clearly speaking to the softer side of men.

1,035.4 MILES

Roughly the distance between Rocha’s native Dublin and the heart of Florence, this number matters because, as Rocha explained after the show, the characters that she’d imagined for the collection - archetypes like workers, artists and dancers - had made the long journey from Ireland to Italy in search of a new life. They wore single-breasted backless blazers, silk organza tunics, billowing black culottes and one embroidered blouson jacket straight out of a Shakespeare production. Elsewhere, thick ribbons of gingham check were stitched to the front of a t-shirt, Fairisle patterns adorned coffee-coloured sweater vests, while Broderie Anglaise lined the inside of jackets and the hems of shorts.

30 KNOBBLY KNEES

Speaking of shorts, cut-offs in all their variations seem to be a central pillar of Rocha’s menswear offering, with hemlines rising to higher than ever before. Gingham pairs, satin boxers and narrow woollen dress shorts rose to reveal about 30 knees (if we’re counting correctly), with even more shin-length variations on offer too. Though this may be a “men’s” collection, there’s something disarmingly childlike about seeing 15 sets of knobbly knees bouncing down the runway, which speaks to Rocha’s vision for modern men. “There is knowing innocence to proportions that nod to different stages of man – childhood, adolescence, adulthood,” said the designer in the collection’s notes.

9 SILK ORGANZA FEATHER BOAS

Another anchor of the collection were the delicate boas slung over shoulders, looped around necks or trailing on the floor. From a distance, they looked to be crafted from feathers in the traditional sense, but on closer inspection they were actually made from fine silk organza. No, a feather boa may not be a part of a traditional men’s wardrobe, but Rocha’s modus operandi with this collection was about “challenging notions of the male wardrobe” and conveying a “subversive vulnerability”.

4 PINAFORE APRONS

Another item that firmly subverted gender expectations were the pinafore aprons. While one ankle-length version was rendered in a masculine black leather, others came in thigh-skimming ecru and with frilly white ruffles. While Mrs Prada showed aprons on women at Miu Miu SS26, the feminine-coded item takes on a different meaning here, subtly undermining how gender can be codified by clothing and vice versa.