Simone Rocha has always been a world-builder. Since launching her eponymous label in 2010, the Irish designer has populated her particular universe with pearls and perspex, Catholic iconography and folkloric heroines, debutantes, dolls, and clothes both devotional and danger-inflected. But in crafting this evocative universe, for Rocha, has never meant sealing its borders.
Collaboration has repeatedly offered a way to open up the oyster of Simone Rocha and unleash the pearls. An early partnership with J. Brand saw her transpose the ruffles and saturated colors into denim, learning about washes and dyeing in the process. In 2024, she entered Jean Paul Gaultier’s archive as the house’s guest couturier, describing the experience to Vogue as a chance “to see what your spirit does in response.” And this June, another expansion: her first standalone menswear show, staged as Pitti Uomo’s guest designer in Florence, where she described it as “a new chapter in my work and world.”
The best collaborations, she tells Vogue from her east London studio, result in something that “either party couldn’t produce like the other.”
“I love to take people by surprise and be like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting that, but of course I totally see that.’ That’s when I think something can feel magical,” Rocha says.
Which brings us to adidas, and the beginning of a long-term partnership between adidas Originals and Simone Rocha. The first collaboration was revealed at the designer’s fall 2026 show inside the cavernous, regal Alexandra Palace during London Fashion Week in February. The collection interweaved sensuous ideas: the ancient Gaelic story of eternal youth and romance in the mythological tale Tír na nÓg, with Perry Ogden’s 1999 photographic series Pony Kids, where youths from Dublin’s housing estates ride horses in a mix of equestrian gear and well-loved sports kits. This was articulated in signature sporty adidas silhouettes transmutated through Rocha’s soft, feminine lens: lace-layered and ruffle-fronted track pants, diamanté and pearl-studded football socks, broderie anglaise draping bags.
Faced with the considerably larger universe of the Three Stripes, Rocha found herself asking a characteristically specific question: “Adidas is just a big universe. So I’m kind of like: ‘What is our planet?’” Here, exclusively on Vogue, the fuller picture unfurls: photographed by Justine Kurland in one dreamy tableau. The full collection will launch September 10 globally.
As it turns out, Rocha had been dressing for that plane since she was a teenager. There are generations of Irish schoolgirls who know it well, too. “I used to wear adidas under my school skirt,” the designer recalls. Later, at college, the combination evolved into something much closer to the visual language she would eventually build a fashion house around: vintage petticoats and old tutus worn with adidas Three Stripes football shorts underneath. “I had a red Firebird with black stripes that I loved,” she says. “I always appreciated how it grounded the femininity that came very naturally to the way I dressed.”
