Simone Rocha’s adidas Debut Finally Arrives, Pearls, Ribbons and All

Seven months after its London runway debut, the Irish designer’s first adidas Originals collection releases September 10, mixing ballet flats with Dublin’s horse culture.

Simone Rocha‘s first collaboration with adidas Originals releases 10 September, bringing apparel, footwear, accessories and jewellery to adidas, Simone Rocha’s own stores and site, and select stockists. It closes a gap that opened back in February, when the pairing made its debut not as a press release but as a runway show.

The two brands formally introduced the collide on 22 February 2026, when Rocha’s 60-look Autumn/Winter 2026 show took over the Alexandra Palace Theatre in North London during London Fashion Week. It was the first time either brand had confirmed the partnership publicly, and it arrived without warning: a Simone Rocha x adidas Originals mark stamped across track jackets and knee-high socks was the first sign that the collection on the runway wasn’t just styled with adidas pieces, it was built with adidas. Seven months is a fairly typical runway-to-shelf gap for a designer collaboration of this scale, giving both sides time to move from show samples into a full production run across multiple categories at once.

Rocha herself has been a fixture of London Fashion Week since 2010, when she launched her label straight out of Central Saint Martins with a graduate collection shown at the Tate Modern. Born and raised in Dublin, the daughter of fashion designer John Rocha, she trained first at the National College of Art and Design before her MA in London, and went on to be named Young Designer of the Year by Harper’s Bazaar in 2014 and Womenswear Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards in 2016. Alexandra Palace, the venue she picked for this particular show, is a Victorian exhibition hall overlooking the city from high ground in North London, chosen for a collection built around personal history rather than a straightforward product pitch.

For several seasons before this, Rocha’s runway shows had featured a different recurring collaborator: pearl-encrusted Crocs, shown alongside her ready-to-wear so regularly they had become something of a signature. Swapping that out for adidas at the AW26 show read, to outlets covering it, as a deliberate shift rather than a straightforward addition to her collaboration roster.

A black velvet slip-on sneaker adorned with pearl embellishments and metal-tipped laces.

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The footwear runs five releases across three adidas models, and each one keeps its base construction while losing the parts a runway audience would least expect a sportswear label to give up. adidas Originals itself is the heritage arm of the wider adidas business, a line built since 1997 around the brand’s archive rather than its current performance range, which is exactly the kind of foundation a fashion collaboration needs: recognisable silhouettes with decades of history attached, flexible enough to be reworked without losing what makes them adidas. The three models chosen here all carry that kind of history themselves: the Japan and Taekwondo both trace back to low-profile training and martial-arts shoes from adidas’ archive, while the Climacool built its name in the 1990s as one of the brand’s first mesh-ventilated running constructions, a technical starting point about as far from ballet flats as adidas’ catalogue gets.

The adidas Japan Slip-On gets converted into a backless mule, its pony-hair upper decorated with pearls set across the Three Stripes, finished with oversized ribbon laces, ornate tongue detailing and soft pink insoles. It comes in light tan and black. The Taekwondo, a low-profile martial-arts silhouette from adidas’ archive, loses its tongue altogether: ribbon laces stretch directly across the foot, pleating runs across the toe, and clear gems are set into the shape of flowers and Trefoils, arriving in light pink/red and black/red. The Climacool gets the most technical rebuild of the three, its usual mesh construction swapped for leather with lace mesh reintroduced through the midfoot for ventilation, three jewelled Trefoils set into the heel, and the same ribbon lacing across the foot in place of a tongue.

The Taekwondo choice is a small but telling one. It’s the same silhouette Caroline Hú reworked for her own CLOT-branded adidas Originals collaboration at Paris Fashion Week the previous season, also in service of a soft, balletic reinterpretation of a martial-arts shoe. Two different women’s-wear designers landing on the same base silhouette for the same kind of transformation, within a year of each other, says as much about adidas’ current archive strategy as it does about either individual collaboration.

On the runway in February, at least one outlet covering the show predicted the ribbon-trimmed flats would be the first pieces to sell out, pointing to Rocha’s track record with embellished footwear in past collaborations, from her pearl-covered Crocs to earlier work with Moncler and H&M.

 

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Apparel keeps adidas’ basic vocabulary, track tops, tracksuit bottoms, leotards, while changing almost everything about how it sits on the body. Track jackets arrive with puffed sleeves and pearl zip pulls, sporty shorts get remade in silk as what amounts to dressy hot pants, and long-sleeve three-stripe tops pick up baby pink ruffles. Hypebeast reported that silhouettes elsewhere in the collection range from silky hot pants and co-branded leotards to deconstructed, pleated tulle dresses hand-embroidered with satin ribbon, alongside tulle skirts and puffed sleeves layered directly over classic track jackets.

Accessories carry a similar logic. Oversized bow-adorned bags sit alongside a structured white weekend tote covered in repeated adidas branding, while smaller pieces, pearl-accented headbands, bedazzled Trefoil hair barrettes and ribbon-laced gloves, extend the collection’s decorative language into things you’d normally overlook. Rocha also reworked the co-brand mark itself: the adidas Trefoil sits nested inside her own signature “SR” ribbon motif, a hybrid logo that shows up embroidered into tech-nylon dresses, printed on knee-high socks and stamped across bags rather than tucked away on a single hangtag.

Further into the collection, the sportswear references get looser and the eveningwear references get heavier. An MA1 bomber jacket was reworked with detachable, furry split snorkel hoods that double as collars over entirely different looks elsewhere in the show. A red track jacket and matching shorts appeared early, followed later by an ivory dress in paper nylon featuring a redesigned adidas Trefoil worked into ruffled fabric, and, further still, a deep-green satin gown cinched dramatically at the waist that had nothing overtly sporty about it at all beyond the three stripes running up one sleeve. adidas’s own sporting DNA effectively migrated across an entire fashion collection rather than staying contained to a single capsule section of it.

A pair of pale pink Simone Rocha crew socks featuring a red embroidered logo and embellished red crystals.

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Rocha has said the collaboration was years in the making. Speaking to British Vogue around the runway debut, she revealed she had been in discussions with adidas for several years before the two sides settled on a collection. adidas described the partnership in a statement as one that “allows unique interpretations of Rocha’s archetypical garments, cross-pollination of looks, hybrid pieces.” Rocha herself put it more simply in comments carried around the show: “Sports are so emotional and I’m a very emotional designer.”

The reference point running underneath the whole collection is Perry Ogden’s Pony Kids, a 1990s photobook documenting the horse and sportswear culture of working-class Dublin teenagers, later cited by multiple outlets covering the runway show as the collection’s visual anchor. Rocha has spoken about wearing adidas running shorts under vintage tutus as a teenager growing up in Dublin, and that specific, personal collision of ceremonial dressing and sportswear runs through nearly every piece in the collection rather than sitting off to one side as a themed capsule. Track jackets appear cinched with lace at the waist; ruffled track pants get paired with crinolined gowns fastened with hooks, eyes and scarlet ribbon. The adidas pieces aren’t guest appearances inside a Simone Rocha collection so much as ingredients folded into it.

The wider Autumn/Winter 2026 collection that the adidas pieces sat inside of drew on Irish mythology and youth culture more broadly, continuing themes Rocha has returned to across several seasons. One outlet framed the show around what it called “horse girls and boys,” tying the sportswear-and-tutu pairing to the Lunar calendar’s Year of the Fire Horse, a detail more astrological curiosity than design brief, but one that lined up neatly with a collection already steeped in pony culture. Rocha has generally treated her collaborators, adidas included, as material to be worked into that larger, ongoing personal narrative rather than as a separate marketing moment bolted onto the side of it.

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The Simone Rocha x adidas Originals collection launches 10 September through adidas.com, Simone Rocha’s own stores and website, the adidas Confirmed app, and a short list of stockists globally. Pricing has not been made public as of writing, though given Rocha’s usual positioning it is expected to sit well above adidas’ standard footwear and apparel range.

The collaboration also fits a pattern adidas Originals has leaned into across 2026: pairing its archive with womenswear designers working in explicitly romantic, non-streetwear registers, rather than the brand’s more familiar roster of streetwear labels and athletes. Willy Chavarria has now worked with adidas Originals across four seasons, reworking the archival Jabbar silhouette through a Chicano-heritage lens each time, work that has run alongside his winning the CFDA’s Menswear Designer of the Year award. Caroline Hú has done the same with the Samba, the Superstar, and, most recently, the Taekwondo, filtering each through her own romantic, fragile-looking aesthetic. Rocha’s debut, with its pearls, ribbons and Dublin horse-culture backstory, extends that same idea into new territory rather than starting a new one.

adidas Originals has spent the better part of a decade building a collaborator list well outside conventional sportswear, from Pharrell Williams to Palace Skateboards to Kanye West’s Yeezy line. Threading a Dublin-born womenswear designer with no prior sportswear background into that same roster, and handing her three archival shoe families to rework rather than a single limited colourway, suggests adidas is treating the Rocha partnership as a longer relationship rather than a one-off fashion month moment. The collection is available 10 September at adidas.com, simonerocha.com, and in Simone Rocha’s London, New York and Hong Kong stores.