Roksanda Ilincic took over an outdoor space for her show—an enclosed circle within the vast, Brutalist ’70s architecture of the Barbican Centre, an arts landmark in London. The September sun shone down on her gathering. A mellifluous breeze conspired just enough to catch the sculptural volume of her dresses in motion.
She captured a powerful sense of ceremony in her opening. Instead of color and exuberance, there was a surprise: the entrance of a lean black tailored coat, topped with a towering, draped headdress. It was followed later with further iterations in gray and white. Ilincic, who was born in Belgrade and has been a mainstay of London fashion since emerging from Central Saint Martins MA in 2005, was bringing a part of her Serbian heritage and culture to the fore. “All the hats are inspired by the priests in the monasteries back home. I went to visit two of them with my mother recently,” she explained. “I was really inspired with that whole kind of heritage that’s been in front of my eyes for quite a while—but somehow you lose a sense of it because it’s always there.” The monastic sobriety was a chance to emphasize the tailoring side of Ilincic’s work—a daywear counterpoint to her voluminously fluid evening dresses.
Before coming to London, Ilincic studied art and architecture in Belgrade—foundational traits that have stayed with her, perhaps becoming even stronger with age and confidence. Her sense of color—like the single strokes of cobalt blue, orange, verdant green, and violet here—draws a following and close relationships with women from across the arts. Her statuesque shapes are photogenic from a distance and intriguing close up, this time revealing gilded hardware as straps or sheer panels or “windows,” as she called them, spiraling through the fabric. “There is a slightly deeper note in the collection,” she said. “This connection between something that is inside of us that we’ve been trying to hide, but maybe we also want to expose.”
A soprano sang operatic arias throughout the show—an oblique reference, Ilincic said, to the emotion of the monastic Orthodox Christian singing she heard in church as a girl. Except, of course, the singer and the designer were women: Ilincic’s command of an empowered female point of view couldn’t be more abundantly clear.
