“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence,” observed E.M. Forster in 1908’s A Room With A View. This is a novel in which Forster shows the sensory stimulation of this city—its art, its heat, its beauty—as the catalyst that moves his characters to reject convention and follow their hearts. Almost 120 years on, Simone Rocha has been getting used to waking up in Florence while preparing for her very first all-menswear show here this evening. Speaking just before it, she 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.”
While gestating the collection, Rocha returned to the 1985 Merchant Ivory movie adaptation of Forster’s book, reacquainting herself with an Oscar-winning suite of Edwardian costume design by Jenny Beavan and John Bright almost as exquisitely realized as Florence itself. “This is my Irish man and he’s arrived in Florence and become the main character,” she said of a designed ensemble that was inhabited by multiple character studies. It was shown in the performance space of the Teatro della Pergola, a 17th-century opera house, with all of the curtains raised to show the guts of the backstage. “It’s the bare bones of the space, and I think that this shows an interesting kind of clash between the ornate and the industrial,” she said.
Ruffled rugby jerseys, long-hemmed shirting with stiff formal bibs and collars set in needle-striped linen, Gladstone bags, metal sleeve garters, shiny Oxford shoes (sometimes spiked) and super-wide Oxford bag pants and culottes were glances back towards the British Isles. Tailored jackets were presented with conventional-ish front facades (a strapped turn-up apart) but with gaping, ruffle-edged cut-outs at the back. Many of the models wore lilac-stained organza feather boas.
These seemed a reference to playing dress-up, an impression further enforced by the source of the quaintly pretty florals that garlanded ties as print and garments as embroidery: Rocha explained that she’d encountered this particular pattern lining the theater’s costume trunks. From her own repository of male character studies she drew an artist in shorts and a smock of black silk worn above Mary Jane pumps. There were aprons in leather and linen with pearl buttons and embroideries accompanied by linen broderie anglaise cravats and cotton broderie anglaise boxer shorts: these looks hewed towards craft.
Models carried bouquets of locally picked cornflowers and linen artist’s rolls tucked into their bags. Beyond the pattern and texture of Rocha’s carefully composed unstill lives there was an added layer of assembly through the purposefully akimbo buttoning, bows only semi-raveled, the long socks at wrinkly half-mast, and hands placed to present a coat’s skirt half flipped open. Within all this sat garments whose potential for playing dress-down in seemed inevitably overshadowed, including handsome nappa leather topcoats, gingham shirting, and scrunched flower-pocket track jackets.
Rocha’s vision of menswear is extremely feminine, although she kept emphasizing “tenderness,” which is not (or shouldn’t be) a gendered quality. Some might find her menswear mix too spiked by softness to entertain, but others will see something here that very few other designers offer—and follow their hearts towards it.
