Head strong
Roksanda Ilincic is a fierce fashion designer: she does it for women, does it her way – with incredible colour and swagger.
Iam all about liberation,” Roksanda Ilincic is saying. “In the past it was much more of a strict dress code. All of that now is disappearing, along with perceptions of women having to wear certain things.” The London-based designer is talking on the phone about eveningwear with relatively heavy Slavic inflections, a strong surviving attribute from her native Serbia, with a conviction that makes you feel the 39-year-old designer is sage beyond her years. Hearing this is a relief. Whenever Ilincic herself attends events, almost always wearing her own designs, she’s impeccable. It’s good to know she approves of more achievable dress codes.
“I think women should wear whatever they feel like on the night. If they want to feel like princesses all dressed up, then they should. If they want to feel like wearing a pair of jeans, or black trousers and a black jacket, then it looks just as beautiful,” she adds. “My fashion is definitely woman-inspired and woman-freeing and woman-encouraging.”
Admittedly though, being “you” in one of her pieces is to be an elevated version of yourself. Ilincic (pronounced Ill-in-chik) has mastered occasion dressing. She’s ticked off the A-list following: Duchess of Cambridge, Samantha Cameron, Michelle Obama, Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain, January Jones … the list goes on.
But it’s not only society women and Hollywood actresses who inhabit her oftentimes dramatic but miraculously lightweight pieces. Her ability to see the beauty in the offbeat then work it into her designs has drawn in a younger, edgier contingent. Think It girls tripping out the front door of Claridge’s at 2am in kicky, abbreviated versions of her cocktail dresses. What demarcates her from legion designers who do a good party dress is her particular, arresting use of colour in deliberately jarring colour combinations – petrol with ballet pink, moss greens, and toffee browns with cornflower – and cleverly placed graphic prints.
When she launched her label Roksanda in 2005, this approach didn’t immediately win favour. “Some reviews were saying I didn’t know how to put colours together,” she recounts. Her mix of unexpected fabrications – rough textures with chiffon – along with a proclivity for coupling feminine with unexpected elements, didn’t help. “Not everyone quite understood what I was doing. Why was I having a sweatshirt with a beautiful dress or skirt?”
The late educator Louise Wilson of Central Saint Martins got it. “Louise gave you this incredible freedom to experiment and push the boundaries,” Ilincic recounts of her time studying in London after she moved from Belgrade in 1999. She was encouraged to develop a fashion voice by exploring interests outside of fashion’s usual orbit, such as fine art, literature and architecture.
For Ilincic, London as a cultural hub only added to this. “I guess just being in London’s centre, with so many new ideas – not just fashion ideas but music and movies – this scene that is very kind of art-driven. It was very, very inspirational.”
Her first collection consisted of only 13 dresses in rich colours. By focusing on cocktail pieces she aimed to shift existing paradigms of how women should dress when they want to dress up. “I think it’s important to push certain well-established perceptions about what beauty is, what classical things are, what use of colour is,” she says. Over the next 11 years, the critics came around. “Now I’m famous for my colours!” Not to mention famous for a single style. The Margot dress, an Ilincic signature, sold out at Matches 80 times over.
Prior to Central Saint Martins, Ilincic discovered touch points including Shakespeare and architecture as a design student in Belgrade. An ability to marry these to the Zeitgeist gives her designs a complete relevancy. “I love classical things, but I also love underground things,” she says. “You also have to be relevant to the time that you’re living in and something that has to play into real life. It’s not just a vessel for expressing ideas that are only relevant to you, but it’s something that’s relevant to society and the culture.”
That might suggest then Ilincic is unaware of her own selling power as a person. The fine-boned, auburn-haired designer is as tall and lithe as a model. Reviewers often remark on how well suited her designs are to women of exactly her stature, though Ilincic is adamant she’s interested in dressing all women. “I think the point of fashion is that you’re creating something that is there to be enjoyed by many.”
For the designer, it was building her own family that broadened her horizons. As a mother to her five-year-old daughter Efimia, Ilincic evolved her offering, adding daywear to slot into working wardrobes. “Before having a daughter I wasn’t so much in touch with how busy life can get and how easy you need to be dressed in order to meet crazy deadlines.”
For pre-fall 2016, Ilincic filled her usual quota of dresses alongside a healthy offering of separates: tailored pants, smart jackets, hardworking knits. “It’s the idea to create a whole wardrobe for a woman that goes 24 hours, seven days a week. It’s something that she can wear on any occasion.”
A designer who wears her own clothes, she has intimate knowledge of how they feel on the body. Comfort is important, something which studying architecture afforded her. “I loved buildings without walls that looked like they were floating.” Equally, her clothing seemingly floats without scaffolding. “If I can avoid a corset I will – with a different type of construction.” Making life easier for women is paramount, and in the past she has made a point of referencing female artists like Julia Dault and Laurie Kang. For many years she wore a pendant of Sveta Petka, the Balkan saint who protects women. In her cocooning dresses and enveloping skirts, there’s the real sense of a buffer from the outside world.
Roksanda handbags debuted for autumn/winter ’16/’17, and she tells me sunglasses are on the way. The label opened its first stand-alone store relatively recently, in 2014, and since then Ilincic has launched a jewellery collection as well as shoes in collaboration with Tabitha Simmons. It’s getting ever easier to become the head-to-toe Roksanda woman that Ilincic embodies. And though she’s says the women who wear her designs are diverse, she can identify a link: “They are all quite strong in terms of fashion and they know what they want. They are independent and free spirits.” She may well be describing herself. Roksanda is available from selected Myer stores from July.