Simone Rocha Opens LFW Fall/Winter 2026 with adidas Originals Collaboration, Cascading Pearls

Simone Rocha opened her London Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2026 show on February 22, 2026 with a 60-look collection that married the designer’s familiar romantic vocabulary to an unexpected collaboration with adidas Originals. The scale of the presentation - sixty looks in a single slot - allowed Rocha to layer motifs and textures, letting bows, ruffles and voluminous tulle sit alongside repeated motifs of cascading pearls.

Pearls were a through line in the collection, described in coverage as cascades of pearls. On the runway those cascades read as integrated jewelry and couture embellishment: strings of pearls threaded through trims, pooling at necklines and along hemlines, and working with ruffled tulle to catch movement under the lights. The effect was deliberate and technical, a study in how pearls function as body architecture when deployed across shoulders, collars and tiers of skirt fabric.

The inclusion of adidas Originals altered that romantic grammar in surprising ways. Rocha placed the athletic imprint inside a traditionally ornate framework, folding sportswear references into lace and beading rather than substituting them. The collaboration appeared across the sixty looks in measured doses, creating a dialogue between the brand’s modern, logo-driven codes and Rocha’s ornate silhouettes. The result was not a spectacle of branding but a quieter hybridization that reframed adidas Originals elements as components in an embroidered, pearl-laden vocabulary.

From a craftsmanship standpoint the show emphasized handwork as much as concept. Pearls cascaded through ruffles and across tulle panels in patterns that required precise attachment and weight management to preserve drape over breathy fabrics. Those technical choices mattered on a runway designed to move: the tulle had to buoy the pearls without collapsing, and the bows had to anchor beaded strands so the pieces read as both clothing and jewelry. The labor implied by those details, hand-sewn pearl strings, layered tulle, and the tailoring of volumes across sixty looks, was as central to the collection’s argument as the adidas partnership.

Simone Rocha’s Fall/Winter 2026 show at London Fashion Week thus extended her signature romantic language while testing its boundaries with sportswear collaboration. By threading cascades of pearls through ruffles, bows and tulle alongside adidas Originals accents, Rocha proposed a new mode of pearl dressing, one that treats pearls as mobile ornament and structural detail across the body rather than as discrete, wearable trinkets.