Roberts | Wood | SS20

Featured on Modèle Magazine

https://www.modelemagazine.co.uk/post/roberts-wood-ss20

Alluring the audience into a sanctuary of self-exploration, the Roberts Wood SS20 collection offered a profound underlying message of identity. Exploring ideas of womanhood and identify, the spring summer collection opens the mind to a concept of self-image, a notion explored through clothing. Using fashion as an armour and expression for our own identities, Roberts wood perfectly captures the concept of assertion through design, a powerful communication to others about our identities, employing attire for pleasure, protection and expression, further reinforced by our emotions.

Throughout this collection Wood juxtaposes strength and softness an enticing concept, both gentle and harsh on the eye, delicate ruffles signature to the designer contrast against ridged pleats and powerful graphics offering a nudge towards a psychedelic visual. A distinction used to recognise and support the wearers expression of vulnerability, as a fearless action.

The collection re defines concepts of femininity, offering references to role models in the form of prints. These references include iconic heroines from the designer’s childhood recollections of female figures, including Joan of Arc and Catherine of Alexandria. Across a number of pieces within the line, personal mythologies of the designer are explored, offering the audience a chance to study their own. Questioning the imposed stereotypes, Wood challenges typical aesthetics associated with each gender.

Within the fabrics, stitching and design of each piece, Wood embeds the essence of herself as a designer, capturing her personal value system, holding an echo of the process that brought it to life. Whilst embracing technology for the collection using original, digitally engineered printed fabrics and Macro photography. Roberts also ensures to protect the values behind artisanal making, engineering her designs to entwine the aesthetic and processes that form the clothing to speak a silent language of its production, a signature left by Roberts Wood herself.

Adding a further level of intrigue to the collection, Wood utilises the medium of projection, playing with the physical boundaries of the show space, communicating three digital memories of the collections design process, projecting the former into the current physical space, playing with the boundaries of past and present, a strong recognised technique built into the thought provoking collection.