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 a