19
By Emma Harrison
“I am not one for labels — and I particularly don’t like that label,” said Ms. Ilincic, 40. Wearing her long, dark hair loose and clad in one of her own designs, she clasped a mug of herbal tea and smiled politely.
“That term — ‘power dressing.’ To me, it has all the wrong connotations; all ’80s shoulder pads and forced uncomfortable shapes,” the former architecture student and Central St. Martins graduate continued. “It suggests a type of dressing where women are not able to be their authentic selves. In fact, they try very deliberately not to be themselves. And that is the antithesis of what my brand is all about.”
Certainly Roksanda, the designer’s line founded in 2005, offers an alternate approach to more conventional ideas about how powerful women should dress —
one that has to do with voluminous, unabashedly feminine shapes, unexpected color combinations and idiosyncratic block prints.
Yet Samantha Cameron chose a navy geometric Roksanda shift when she left 10 Downing Street for the final time in 2016, after her husband David Cameron stepped down as the British prime minister. Michelle Obama, the former first lady, wore a draped jewel-toned Roksanda dress for her own trip to Downing Street in 2011, and packed two color-block dresses for her tour of Asia in 2015. And the new first lady, Melania Trump, famously chose a white version of the lantern-sleeved Margot dress by Roksanda for her speech at the Republican National Convention last July, having bought it herself from Net-a-Porter. It sold out immediately online.
“There is a real simplicity to her designs that allow the wearer of the clothes to be the star, and yet there’s always that splash of drama,” said Jeffrey Kalinsky, founder of the Jeffrey boutique chain and the designer fashion director at Nordstrom, one of the leading retailers of Roksanda in the United States. “There’s nothing else out there at the moment like her, really, and these clients want to be associated with a unique point of view.”
“She’s about to get catapulted to the next level,” Mr. Kalinsky added. “This is a label that has tremendous legs.”