Twenty years ago, one ginormous, electric-blue overblown explosion of a dress essentially started everything for Roksanda Ilincic. It appeared at her breakfast-time salon show in London in 2005 in the startlingly civilized surroundings of the Bibendum restaurant, at a time when London venues were mostly in freezing warehouses at night. Suddenly here was this young woman whipping up volume and vividness with a neo-feminine neo-feminist flourish.
She had us at that first frisson. “Everything else was black and gray at the time, so the color appeared quite shocking,” she remembers. “As the model was walking, she was hitting the tables and hitting people’s faces with the dress, a bit like an old couture show.” Two decades on, she tracks the beginning of her London business back to that moment—because Vogue Runway’s precursor Style.com posted that dress on the front page next morning, triggering retailers to rush to place their first orders with her.
Essentially, the magnification and amplification of that same Roksanda aesthetic has gathered circles of friends and artists to her ever since. Beyoncé, Michelle Obama, Bjork, Vanessa Redgrave, her daughter and granddaughter Joely Richardson and Daisy Bevan are amongst them—as are contemporary artists, gallerists, and curators.
When she emerged from Central Saint Martins MA amongst the cohort that included Jonathan Saunders, Richard Nicoll, and Christopher Kane, she notes what few noticed at the time: “I was their only girlfriend! There were no other women starting to show. But I think the advantage—not just with me, but with all other female creatives—is that you don’t have to have a muse. You don’t have to think about how, why, and where something would be worn. And you’re also with your friends, so you understand the variables of what they’re feeling too.”
As the social gear of London shifted upwards in the booming aughts and 2010s, political women ditching were mousy skirt suits for colorful dresses, and the Frieze art market practically turned into a second fashion week. Roksanda was right there for all of it. “I love volume, and I also love the female body and natural curves. I take it almost like a sculptor. There’s the possibility to be bold and big and to have the large gestures,” she says. Her relationships with creative dressers blossomed. “It happened very naturally, because I naturally gravitate towards art, and I think that people appreciate that they can also understand what I’m doing from a fashion perspective. There’s a genuine connection.”
