I knew Simone Rocha was going to give us romance. Lace, flowers, bows, something slightly haunted, something slightly beautiful. That part was never really in doubt.

But then the first looks came out and I found myself thinking: Oh. We’re going somewhere else.

Because this collection feels less like “pretty” and more like what happens when prettiness starts to unravel.

And honestly? I love that.

Presented at London’s Old Bailey, Rocha returned to one of her most familiar territories — femininity, ceremony, lace, roses, the body — but approached it through a darker, more painterly lens. British Vogue notes that Caravaggio’s The Betrayal of Christ became a key reference, with Rocha deliberately interested in taking familiar things slightly out of context.

You can feel that tension immediately.

There is the ivory lace, almost bridal, but it isn’t behaving like bridalwear. It becomes outerwear. It becomes a cocoon. It wraps around the body rather than simply decorating it. The first look in these images is almost painfully delicate — an embroidered, translucent coat over lace-trimmed trousers, crystal shoes, and that enormous black bow held against the chest.

And that bow.

OH MY GOD.

It feels like a gift, a shield, a wound, a costume and a little bit of emotional baggage all at once.

That is the thing about Rocha. Her clothes have always had this strange ability to be incredibly feminine without ever becoming passive. There is softness, yes, but there is usually something underneath it pushing back.

This season that tension becomes almost theatrical.

The silhouettes move between cocooning volumes and deliberately exposed bodies. A pale pink strapless dress expands into an enormous cloud of tulle and flowers, almost as if a perfectly prim debutante has wandered into a dream and accidentally stepped through the wrong door. Elsewhere, the body disappears completely beneath black volume, while enormous crimson roses climb around the head like some wonderfully sinister floral armour.

It is romantic.

It is ridiculous.

It is slightly frightening.

And then — somehow — it is all three at exactly the same time.

Rocha’s use of flowers is particularly interesting because they aren’t simply decorative. They become architecture. Roses are built into the silhouette, gathered around the face, enlarged until they stop reading as flowers and start reading as objects. The black-and-red hooded look is almost sculptural in its construction, turning the model into a character rather than simply presenting her as a wearer.

And then comes the tailoring.

A cream leather-like jacket with folded, sculptural rosettes running down the front is paired with a sheer, feathered skirt. Again, Rocha refuses the obvious combination. Tailoring meets fragility. Structure meets softness. The severe meets the absurdly romantic.

That’s where I think the collection becomes most interesting.

Because Simone Rocha doesn’t seem particularly interested in choosing between opposites.

She wants both.

The girl and the woman.
The bride and the mourner.
The innocent and the dangerous.
The beautiful thing and the slightly unsettling thing sitting underneath it.

And this feels very connected to the evolution of Rocha’s work. Her recent collections have increasingly pushed her signature romantic vocabulary into stranger territory — last season’s collection, for example, deliberately explored character and the idea of a gesture rather than following one straightforward narrative. 

Here, that idea feels even more developed.

The models don’t look like they’re simply wearing clothes.

They look like they’ve arrived from somewhere.

A strange little procession of brides, mourners, debutantes, dolls and women who have clearly been through something but aren’t going to explain it to us.

And I think that’s why these images stay with me.

There is so much happening — lace, sequins, roses, bows, tulle, sculptural tailoring, sheer layers — yet the collection doesn’t feel like it is shouting for attention. The photography itself reinforces that. The models are framed centrally, almost ceremonially, against the dark architectural interior of the Old Bailey. The rigid geometry of the space gives all that softness something to push against.

The effect is almost like looking at an old painting that has suddenly started walking towards you.

Which, given the Caravaggio reference, feels rather appropriate.

And maybe that’s the question I keep coming back to: how far can Simone Rocha push beauty before beauty becomes something else?

Because this collection seems to suggest that the answer is: quite far.

Far enough for lace to become armour.

For a rose to become a mask.

For a bow to become a burden.

For a wedding dress to look slightly like mourning.

And for femininity to feel not fragile, but almost aggressively alive.

That’s what I took away from Simone Rocha this season.

Not sweetness.

Not prettiness.

Something stranger.

Something with teeth.

And, naturally, quite a lot of lace