I have a confession: for the first few looks, I thought Roksanda was trying to behave.

And I mean that affectionately.

There was something almost suspiciously controlled about it. Black tailoring. Soft ivory. Muted beige. Clean trousers. Sharp shoulders. A little scarf here, a glove there. Everything beautifully contained, beautifully disciplined. The sort of clothes that make you stand up slightly straighter without quite knowing why.

And then suddenly — colour.

Then fringe.

Then those enormous sculptural hips.

And I thought: OH. There you are.

That, for me, is what makes this collection interesting. It begins with restraint, but it doesn’t stay there. It slowly loosens its grip until the clothes become almost architectural — as if someone took the quiet elegance of the opening looks and kept turning the volume knob until the whole thing started to bend, expand and move around the body.

The tailoring is where the story begins. There are beautifully controlled blazers and elongated proportions, the kind of precise construction that feels very Roksanda without needing to announce itself. A black suit is softened by an ivory silk scarf printed with loose, painterly marks. A camel-toned tailored look is interrupted by powder-blue opera gloves. The colour isn’t really living in the clothes yet.

It’s hiding in the accessories.

And I kept thinking about that.

Because perhaps this is the collection’s little trick. Colour is present from the beginning, but it’s being held back. Contained. Almost teased.

Then the collection starts letting go.

The painterly print moves from scarf and drape into the actual architecture of the clothes. What began as something soft becomes something structural. The body stops wearing the print and starts being shaped by it.

That’s when things get much more exciting.

There is something wonderfully strange about the way Roksanda plays with volume here. The silhouette suddenly becomes wider, harder, almost sculptural around the hips. The pannier shape isn’t trying to flatter the body in the conventional sense — it creates a new body around it. And I love that. Fashion can be so obsessed with making the body “better” that it’s refreshing when a designer simply says: What if we made the body stranger instead?

And then comes the fringe.

Oh, the fringe.

At first it appears almost innocently — around a shoe, a bag, a hem. A detail. A little movement at the edge of the frame.

But Roksanda doesn’t leave it there.

The fringe grows.

It becomes longer, denser, more physical. Eventually it isn’t finishing the garment anymore. It is the garment.

One look is practically made from cascading strands of pink, red and lilac, turning the body into this strange moving sculpture. Another uses ivory fringe against black, creating a graphic divide that feels almost like a drawing in motion.

It’s excessive.

It’s a little ridiculous.

And honestly, thank God.

Because after all that tailoring, the collection needs something that rattles the cage.

The colour story follows the same progression. The opening feels almost monastic in its restraint — black, ivory, sand, muted neutrals — before saturated pink, acid green, orange, cobalt and crimson start bubbling through. And when those colours finally arrive on the clothes rather than sitting politely on gloves or scarves, they feel earned.

That is the part I kept coming back to.

The collection isn’t really moving from minimalism to maximalism. It’s moving from control to release.

And that is a much more interesting proposition.

Even the setting in these images reinforces it. The hard concrete architecture is brutally simple: horizontal lines, pale stone, strong sunlight, almost nowhere for the eye to hide. The models are photographed centrally, often almost completely still, so the clothes have to provide the movement.

And they do.

The fringe moves.

The pannier silhouettes distort the body.

The scarves lift away from the shoulders.

The sheer ivory layers catch the light.

The prints seem to vibrate against the concrete.

It’s almost like watching a very disciplined woman slowly lose her patience.

First: I’m fine.

Then: I’m absolutely fine.

Then: RIGHT. THAT’S ENOUGH.

And suddenly she’s wearing a giant sculptural gown covered in colour and thread.

I understand her.

What I find particularly compelling is that the collection doesn’t completely smooth out its contradictions. The tailoring and the exuberant fringe don’t always feel like they’re speaking the same language. At moments, you can almost see the join between the two halves. But I’m not sure that’s necessarily a problem.

Actually, I think I prefer seeing the seam.

Because fashion becomes boring when every idea arrives perfectly resolved.

There should be a little friction. A little uncertainty. A moment where you’re thinking, Wait… where exactly is this going?

And then a look comes out and answers you without saying anything.

For me, those final sculptural silhouettes are the images that stay behind. Not because they’re the loudest, but because they make sense of what came before. The restraint. The muted palette. The painterly marks. The accessories. The fringe.

Everything has been quietly building towards the moment when the clothes stop sitting on the body and start building another body around it. 

And perhaps that’s the question Roksanda leaves hanging in the air:

How much can you contain before containment becomes its own kind of drama?

I’m not sure the collection completely answers it.

But I don’t think it needs to.

Sometimes the more interesting thing is watching someone slowly, beautifully, deliberately lose control.

And Roksanda seems to know exactly when to let go