Simone Rocha has always created worlds of her own. Since launching her eponymous brand in 2010, the Irish designer has filled her distinctive universe with pearls and Plexiglas, Catholic iconography and folkloric heroines, debutantes, dolls and clothes that feel at once devotional and dangerous. But for Rocha, creating such an evocative world has never meant closing its borders.
Collaborations have repeatedly offered her the opportunity to prise open the shell of the Simone Rocha world and release its pearls. In an earlier collaboration with J Brand, she brought ruffles and saturated colours to denim, learning about denim washing and dyeing in the process. In 2024, she delved into the Jean Paul Gaultier archive as the house’s guest couturier, describing the experience to Vogue as an opportunity “to see what your spirit creates in response”. Then, this June, came another expansion of her world: her first standalone menswear show, held in Florence, where she presented a collection as Pitti Uomo’s guest designer that she described as “a new chapter in my work and my world”.
The best collaborations, she tells Vogue, result in something that “neither side could produce in the same way as the other”. “I love surprising people and making them think, ‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting this, but of course, now I completely understand it.’ That’s when I think something can feel magical,” Rocha says.
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Which brings us to Adidas and the beginning of a long-term collaboration between Adidas Originals and Simone Rocha. The first collection was unveiled at the designer’s autumn 2026 show in the vast, opulent Alexandra Palace during London Fashion Week in February. The collection brought together sensual ideas: the ancient Gaelic tale of eternal youth and love from the Irish mythological story Tír na nÓg (Land of Eternal Youth) and Perry Ogden’s 1999 photographic series Pony Kids, which portrays young people from Dublin housing estates riding horses in a mix of equestrian gear and their favourite sportswear. All of this was translated into signature Adidas sports silhouettes, reinterpreted through Rocha’s delicate, feminine lens: tracksuits layered with lace and adorned with ruffles down the front, football socks scattered with crystals and pearls, and broderie anglaise bags.
Faced with the much larger universe of the three stripes, Rocha asked herself a characteristically precise question: “Adidas is simply a vast world. So I found myself thinking, ‘What is our planet?’” Now, exclusively in the pages of Vogue, a fuller picture is coming into view, captured in a single dreamlike scene photographed by Justine Kurland. The entire collection will be available globally on 10 September.
It turns out Rocha began wearing that world as a teenager. Generations of Irish schoolgirls know it well too. “I wore Adidas under my school skirt,” the designer recalls. Later, at university, the combination evolved into something much closer to the visual language around which she would eventually build her own fashion house: she wore vintage petticoats and old ballet tutus with three-stripe Adidas football shorts.
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“I had a red Firebird with black stripes that I loved,” she says. “I always liked how it brought balance to the femininity that naturally came through in the way I dressed.”
Justine Kurland
Justine Kurland
That very tension lies at the heart of the Adidas Originals x Simone Rocha collaboration. It is a partnership that caused quite a stir in the fashion world last February, yet for Rocha, it had effectively been hiding in plain sight for decades. There is a certain cultural affinity too. Growing up in the Republic of Ireland, Rocha watched sportswear intertwine with a particular kind of youthful rebellion along the River Liffey. “It is a powerful representation of youth culture, of boys and girls and that whole scene,” she says. “At home, you don’t want to look too dressed up. For me, that is a big part of the culture, almost as if you want to stay firmly grounded.”
The instinct to temper preciousness without sacrificing femininity is already fundamental to Rocha’s work. With Adidas, she pushed that idea further. “For me, it was important to bring it into a feminine space, but from a perspective in which femininity does not mean something delicate or fragile,” she explains. “It was about bringing the idea of strength, something very grounded and versatile, into that more feminine space.” Or, as she put it elsewhere in our conversation: “It’s a kind of hardcore femininity.”
“For me, it was important to bring it into a feminine space, but from a perspective in which femininity does not mean something delicate or fragile. It was about bringing the idea of strength, something very grounded and versatile, into that more feminine space.”
Simone Rocha
The collaboration had been in development for several years, with serious discussions beginning around two years ago. Rocha spent time working with the Adidas team in Germany and exploring its vast archive of prototypes and memorabilia. She was particularly fascinated by the functional origins of objects that have long since crossed the line between sporting equipment and fashion. “Everything has a purpose, everything has a reason,” she says. “Almost everything originated at some point with an athlete and the functionality they needed from a trainer or sports bag. Then it evolves into lifestyle. They take their heritage very seriously, which I truly appreciate.”
For this first chapter, she reached directly into the Adidas canon: Firebird, Superstar, Taekwondo and Japan. The challenge was to ensure that both identities remained recognisable. “The first collection had to feel very, very characteristic of both me and Adidas,” she says. “How can I translate that into SR?” She found the answer in proportion: she increased the volume of the sleeves, altered the cut of the jacket and used familiar Adidas materials in a palette that is unmistakably Rocha’s.
The result is a collection in which the Firebird becomes a cropped, voluminous track top, the sleeves of the Superstar take on a balloon shape and the Beckenbauer is transformed with a layer of tulle beneath its recognisable athletic exterior. Elsewhere, ruffles gently trace the edges of trousers, the hips of skirts and a dress; fitted leotards act like a second skin, while the Airline bag comes in broderie anglaise. Lace trim that appears traditional at first glance conceals tiny Trefoil motifs within its embroidered pattern, while ribbon wraps around the iconic Adidas logo to create a new shared emblem. Rocha even reconsidered the humble zip pull, developing a detachable pearl tear, a variation on her own logo, which can be removed before the garment goes into the washing machine. “I’m not a big-logo brand,” she says, “and this is new for Adidas too.”
If she had to choose one piece that best encapsulates the entire idea behind the collaboration, Rocha would pick the Beckenbauer track top with a built-in tulle tutu skirt. “It really represents the merging of their world and mine,” she says. “That piece feels very iconic to me.”
And then there are the shoes. Three silhouettes, the SR Taekwondo Ballerina, SR Climacool and SR Japan Fuzzy Slip On, take Adidas footwear in a decidedly more flirtatious direction. The Taekwondo is covered in tie ribbons and pearl-like embellishments, the technical Climacool has been transformed into a Mary Jane, while the Japan features a pony-hair-effect upper and sculptural, pearl-like Adidas three stripes. “I’m obsessed with the Japan slip-on,” Rocha says.
Footwear was also one of the areas in which the collaboration presented the steepest learning curve for Rocha. Making a trainer forced her to consider a different relationship between an object and the person wearing it, broadening the way she thought about sportswear. The same questions kept resurfacing throughout the collection. How does a garment feel on the body? What can a person do in it? Is the garment a “second skin” or “an extra layer of protection”?
Acielle/Style Du Monde
Acielle/Style Du Monde
“You have to ask yourself: what is the reality of that material if it is a trainer that someone has to wear every day?” she says. Ironically, all that practicality has not made her own collections any more practical. “Maybe because I worked so much with them on practicality, it made me want to make Simone Rocha even more out of this world,” she laughs. “It pushed me in the opposite direction.”
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The campaign presented alongside the collection carries its own dose of surrealism. Rocha invited American photographer Justine Kurland, whose cult series Girl Pictures she has long admired, to photograph 11 young women, combining familiar faces from Rocha’s world with street casting. (As we speak, behind her is a spacious bookcase filled with Sarah Lucas monographs and old issues of System, many of them drawn from her even larger collection at home.)
“Her work has always been a huge, huge inspiration to me,” Rocha says of Kurland. “We wanted to create a sense of youth and reality, as if they were living in their own world. Her photographs are slightly displaced and slightly dystopian, so I liked the idea of everything feeling like a world of its own.” The photograph brings the entire cast together in a single scene, while the accompanying film moves from individual girls to the wider group.
Justine Kurland
Justine Kurland
The clothes will soon leave the relative intimacy of the Simone Rocha runway and enter Adidas’s vast global ecosystem. “From Yohji Yamamoto and Raf Simons to Grace Wales Bonner, I’m very proud to be part of that fantastic list,” she says. Adidas has long brought together designers with exceptionally strong individual identities, and Rocha is delighted that “my space in that universe feels like its own little world”. She is also intrigued by the thought of people encountering her work for the first time through Adidas. “I think it will be really interesting when the collection comes out,” she says, “because perhaps it will reach a different audience.”
And that world is only just beginning to take shape. The autumn 2026 collection marks the beginning of a long-term collaboration, so Rocha is already thinking about where it might go next, perhaps deeper into performance, or towards other sports and categories. We discuss the possibility of dancewear, volleyball gear or even dressing an Olympic team in a few years’ time. (Meanwhile, rehearsals for her forthcoming spring 2027 collection continue outside the room.)
Justine Kurland
“There are so many techniques in their world that I haven’t explored yet,” she says. “That is exactly what I’m so excited to investigate.” But what seems to intrigue her most is sport as an emotional experience. “The emotion of watching sport, being surrounded by sport, the feeling of belonging to a team, it is such an adrenaline-filled, emotional, dopamine-fuelled experience.” For a designer who has spent her career building worlds around the emotional possibilities of getting dressed, there is still plenty of territory ahead for her to conquer.
