rokh

rokh was founded in 2016 in London by Korean designer Rok Hwang, a former Chloé and Phoebe Philo-era Céline designer who launched the brand specifically focused on what Hwang described as 'a contemporary deconstruction-anchored womenswear vocabulary that drew explicitly on the Phoebe Philo Céline-era proposition rebuilt at an emerging-designer luxury price tier.' The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce a deliberately-Philo-aesthetic womenswear vocabulary at the £400-£2,000 emerging-luxury price tier, with deconstructed-and-asymmetric tailoring construction at the technical level of the Phoebe Philo-era Céline workshops. The rokh vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deliberately-asymmetric and deconstructed single-breasted blazers in Italian-mill wool, oversized boxy cotton-and-linen shirts with deliberate-shoulder-distortion construction, deconstructed denim with hardware-anchored-strap detailing, the brand's iconic seasonal asymmetric-trench overcoats, and a colour palette anchored to washed-navy, oxblood, ecru, soft-pink, washed-charcoal, and the brand's recurring use of mid-grey, taupe, and washed-cream tones. The brand has presented at Paris Fashion Week each season since 2018 and won the LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize semi-finalist position in 2018. The brand is independent and held by Hwang. rokh operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MATCHES, Net-a-Porter, Mytheresa, MR PORTER, Lane Crawford, Boontheshop, the Webster, Holt Renfrew, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-womenswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the most quietly successful post-2016 Korean-British contemporary womenswear brands, with the Phoebe Philo-aesthetic-positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the post-2018 'post-Philo-luxury-recovery' conversation that has been continuously rewritten through the 2020-2024 'quiet-luxury' era.