Fashion in Motion: Roksanda Ilincic

My name is Roksanda Ilincic and today I am a guest of V&A Fashion in Motion.

We have four shows, all the same but actually mixing four of my collections. Fashion in Motion, the name of it, I kind of tried to push even further and introduce some ballet dancers as well, rather than just having models. And what I tried to do is mix fashion really with paintings and Raphael and this beautiful space.

My favourite fabrics which I’m using every season is always natural fabrics, so it’s 100% silk – 100% silk natural fibres in different thicknesses. What I like to do is really combine very heavy, thick, almost upholstery fabrics with something that’s very light, something that almost resembles smoke or clouds. So it almost doesn’t have a texture at all. That is something that is my signature as well.

Inspiration comes from different things. Sometimes it can be literally just a page in a book that I saw that can trigger all the other inspirations that would come and build up into the collection. Or it can be something particular like some vintage dress that I found in my mum’s wardrobe that I’d discovered completely by accident. But what I like to do is really mix different things. It’s really like putting different ingredients and the right level of all ingredients together.

Ballet is something that I really love, that I was brought up with as well. Actually as a little girl I wanted to be a ballet dancer myself, but happened to be too tall. Also because, as I said, the whole name ‘Fashion in Motion’ inspired me to do something that is producing even more motion than just purely the walk of a model which I thought ballet would just link beautifully.

I think that it’s very important to keep the mood of your collections and the sense of your collections, but at the same time it’s always important to move on and to experiment with something new.

Basically the collections that I show is spring/summer 09, autumn/winter 08, spring/summer I think going all the way to 07 and there is one more which I can’t remember – sorry!