Pace is a concept that gets overlooked in fashion. Somewhere along the way, change became synonymous with speed, to the detriment of the industry and the environment. Maybe if fewer products were made, more creativity and care could be put into them. Change needn’t be fast, and it never has been at Alejandra Alonso Rojas, where consistency is valued.
Each season the designer iterates or builds on what has come before and what customers have reacted positively to. And Rojas’s well of inspiration is always the same; her own family albums and history. In the spotlight for spring is a great-great-aunt África Llamas, who in 1931, during the Second Spanish Republic, became one of the country’s first female pilots. “I just wanted to take a little adventure on her plane,” says Rojas of her thought process.
The collection contains a dramatic ombre parachute dress, and leather aviator caps were made and used for styling, but Rojas otherwise abstracted her theme. The main story here are the feel-good primary colors. Some of these were hand-dyed using the Shibori technique (stones are wrapped with string into the fabric; the result is a kind of halo). A red and blue slip dress, as cool looking as a Firecracker popsicle, was tie-dyed on the bias.
Knits and crochets are Rojas’s specialties, and she’s creative in finding inventive ways to play with them. For spring there’s a one-sleeve cable-knit sweater with a long “hem” of fringe, and a touch-me camel hair boucle fabric that’s soft and stretchy. The light-as-air crochets feel especially of the season and of the moment. The summer of 2021 has been about bra-tops and skin. These deliver both and leave one looking forward to the summer to come.
