Simone Rocha – ever fashion’s darling – has seen her star status ascend ever higher in recent months, with the announcement of her H&M collaboration prompting a global obsession with her off-kilter romance. Amidst the frenzy, the designer appears to have doubled down on the codes upon which she established her brand, with the themes that defined her early collections re-explored and elevated anew. Her debut collection, inspired by teenage rebellion and tucking tracksuits under her school uniform to go and smoke cigarettes in the alley near her house, set a blueprint for her world which has been expressly reasserted this season. “A little punk princess,” reflected Fashion East’s Lulu Kennedy of her early years. Over a decade later and biker jackets and leathers appeared for the first time on her runway, in a manner that beautifully reflected the subversive femininity so key to her work; a distended, oversized knit worn with heavy brogues and satchel directly evocative of times spent in alleys. “I really wanted this collection to have a lot of clarity, a lot of identity,” she said. “To look at the codes which felt very me.”

While, all those years ago, Rocha was reflecting on her own school uniform, as a mother in lockdown her perspective has slightly shifted. “My daughter’s not in school at the moment, she’s at home,” Rocha noted. “It’s something that we’re thinking about all the time: that she’s missing being part of a community, not even putting on her school uniform. But that gives her that moment to have her own personal identity [through dress] as well, which infiltrated into it.” While this certainly wasn’t a childrenswear collection (head to H&M for that), “I was  thinking about the naiveté of uniform,” she said. Enter: crisp white shirting, neat little lunch boxes, and schoolgirl pinafores executed without a touch of twee.