Maxine Roeder is a fashion designer specializing in eveningwear and eco-effective fashion. She is drawn to fashion design for its storytelling powers and its functionality as expressive wearable art. For her, fashion merges the conceptual and expressive qualities of art with the practicality of clothing. She sees fashion as a lens to explore topics that are usually examined under a more systematic and conventional approach.
Maxine’s work traverses both the scientific and the emotional, using fashion design as a vehicle to tell stories of nature and the human experience. Drawing on her biology background, Maxine strives to visualize the beauties, enchantments, and struggles of nature. Her work addresses environmental issues, including climate change, habitat fragmentation and species loss. Yet simultaneously, it harnesses the power of human emotion to make these issues tangible to the viewer and to explore how they affect their own emotions. Sustainability is as important to Maxine as aesthetics. She incorporates sustainability in several ways, from using natural fibers, speciality eco-friendly or deadstock fabrics, patterning and draping to minimize waste, and saving and upcycling scraps. She believes in creating clothes that are made to last beyond trends and incorporates principles of modularity and convertibility to maximize their wear.
Maxine’s pieces are detailed, utilizing different fiber manipulations and dye techniques to create expressions of emotion, vulnerability and power. To explore emotional nuances, Maxine juxtaposes the opposing elements of joy and sadness, beauty and decay, and structure and deconstruction. Her design process combines conceptual ideas with abstract methods, as she embraces the instinctual feelings of organically draping on the form to create organic lines and flowing silhouettes.
Maxine Roeder hopes to work in a sustainable luxury niche, one day having her own line of high-end, eco-effective evening and bridal pieces. She firmly believes that women need not sacrifice sustainability and ethics to look beautiful, and hopes to be able to create pieces that allow consumers to embody this philosophy.
Maxine is also a visual and graphic artist, illustrator and photographer, with experience working on book illustration, commissioned drawings and paintings as well as wildlife, event and fashion photography.