This season, Roksanda Ilincic decided not to have a show, “but it comes with exciting news,” she said, “and that is that I’m opening a popup in Sloane Street. Next to Chanel and Pucci. It’s amazing. And the space is huge.”
I went to see her in a light-filled penthouse showroom next to the storied Museum of the Home, (set in a series of restored 18th century almshouses) on the Kingsland Road in the East End of London. Clearly, the setting is inspiring. There, rails are color-coded, from crepuscular greens, with luminous blacks, through to bright Peruvian pink, damson, and pale gray. Ilincic was moved by Gabriele Beverage, an artist who works largely in glass, wrapping sinuous shades of greens and blues, or orange and pinks together, twisting them to create elegantly attenuated forms, and by Dragan Drobnjak, the first sculptor in Serbia to graduate using glass as his medium.
She started development on this collection last July, so that it would be ready for sales in December. Working on it, she was obsessed by Carlo Scarpa’s astonishing mausoleum—the Tomba Brion—built between 1969 and 1978, in San Vito d’Altivole, set against Italy’s Asolo Hills. (Her own home has something of a Scarpa feel about it, raw concrete industrial ceilings, and dark lilac and forest green smooth walls). Philip Johnson said of Scarpa that he had the ability “to make poetry out of the smallest rod or stone.” Inside (and out of) the building, the Venetian born architect made circular openings in the cement walls. The structure is Brutalist but overwhelmingly dazzling in the play of light. “Everything—ceiling, floor—is just magical,” said Ilincic. “They actually call it a sanctuary as well,” said Ilincic. “But what I also love is the nature because obviously you have this quite hard brutalist concrete and then this almost kind of overgrown nature that is taking over the concrete. And this is in Italy, so obviously the nature is so lush.”
Using Scarpa’s idea of the circular doorway, she cut out perfect circles in the back of her overscale, mannish jackets, so that you have a flash of whatever you choose to wear underneath—a satin top in a Howard Hodgkin-inspired print for instance—or nothing at all if you see fit. Handbags, too, follow this concept: two brass perfectly symmetrical loops, to carry a piece made of crushed brown leather. “I think we are in a quite interesting space,” she said, “where we still need a dream…but reality is quite sad.”
Ilincic works primarily with two mills in Italy. She sometimes uses the “blankets” they produce, which is to say the master print with variations used in differing colorways, as they appear, randomly. The effect is delightful. This season one of the mills has developed a lighter-than-light organza cloqué which she has worked up into miraculous colorations. There is a deep coppery brown, for a draped short sleeve top or a fuller skirted evening dress, and a vivid Inca pink, worked into an evening dress with pronounced pleats in front, although it appears as a slim sheath dress when seen from behind.
“I wanted to kind of bridge this gap between day wear and evening wear and really concentrate on day wear for this season and bring it into the evening, so that you can wear those kind of day jackets over the really beautiful evening dresses or a tailoring trouser with exciting evening pieces,” she said.
A light greige (or deep green wool) jacket is cut like a shirt, with a buttoned triangular panel to one side, which according to Ilincic falls like “a gentle waterfall,” worn—conventionally—over cuffed trousers. Or, blending day and evening riffs, this “day” jacket could be slouched over a draped satin evening dress to the floor. There is also the subtle touch of a scarf cut to thread through the jacket. For Ilincic this scarf can be a subtle contrast to the jacket, or a vivid one.
For evening dresses, there is a sheath dress of vivid pink satin, with a train subtly bonded onto an equally vivid orange—Ilincic said there is a touch of the ’90s about these draped looks. And then the finish with a bang: a bright blue fitted taffeta bodice (bonded over a discreet lining of sharp lime green, see it and it’s gone), and then some 17 meters of the blue taffeta ruffled up into a dozen or so panels, starting just below the waist, swinging out like a furling umbrella. Sensational!
