Two people to lace a single boot, two boots per model, thirty-five models: this was the problem facing Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the pair of sisters behind the Los Angeles-based fashion label Rodarte, one morning last February, less than an hour before their fall, 2009, runway show was scheduled to begin. One person steadied the boot as another laced it, crisscrossing the straps like ribbons on a ballet shoe. The sisters had collaborated on the thigh-high leather boots (which, as one blogger put it, “seemed to go all the way up to the lady business”) with Nicholas Kirkwood, the twenty-nine-year-old British shoe designer known for his architectural and vertiginous footwear, and the finished look was supposed to evoke “hands wrapped in plastic in a morgue”—a grotesquerie that Laura had witnessed in a biology class.
The show was being held at the Gagosian gallery, on the far West Side of Manhattan. In a cordoned-off portion of the austere white space, Laura and Kate were coaching a makeshift team of thirty-odd volunteers: students from the Fashion Institute of Technology, several interns, and a few friends. Some were herding the models to hair and makeup stations, or sliding dresses over their asparagus-stalk bodies; most were lacing and relacing the recalcitrant boots. Kate, who is zaftig and often fretful, noticed that a group of models were still in their underwear. “Why aren’t they dressed?” she asked, sighing. “Why don’t they have boots on?” Nearby, Laura, unflustered, turned her attention to a rack of leather jackets, which, like the boots, had the look of bondage gear: tiers of straps that buckled at the midriff and around each arm. She started to fit one onto a model, pulling each strap tightly across the girl’s torso and buckling it, then repeated the process with the smaller versions that encircled the arms. “Please don’t move so much,” she told the tightly encased model. “I want to seet,” the girl wailed. Laura, who is maniacal about the fit of the clothing, said, “You can’t sit down,” and removed a pair of scissors from her pocket to trim superfluous bits of leather from the tiny belts on the sleeves. The model scowled. “I know. It sucks,” Laura said. “I’m sorry.”
People have a difficult time telling the Mulleavy sisters apart. Both have glossy brown hair, dark eyes, and pale skin. (Their mother is Mexican-Italian, and their father is Irish.) Laura, who is twenty-nine, is thinner, with wavier hair and sharper features. Kate, who is thirty, has larger eyes and a rounder face. Both women had on black cardigan sweaters—Kate’s was the sort a frumpy older lady might wear, spangled with crystal appliqués—and black ballet flats. They do not attempt the six-inch heels they routinely send down the runway. “Are you kidding?” Kate said when I asked.
Physical differences aside, the sisters act like a single organism. They share an e-mail account, and send unsigned e-mails, making it impossible to know which one you’re corresponding with. They used to share a cell phone as well. “We didn’t realize it was weird,” Kate said. Their conversation is a polyphonic composition of free associations, digressions, and interruptions; they often finish each other’s thoughts. Autumn de Wilde, a photographer who has been documenting their shows since the first collection, is close to both sisters. “I’ve never had a best friend that’s two people before this,” she said. “Kate has many times told me a story, and Laura will say, ‘Kate, you weren’t there, I was,’ and will continue the story.”
The designers live in Pasadena, far outside the fashion industry’s axes of influence (New York, Paris, Milan, London); until mid-2006, when they rented a studio in downtown Los Angeles, they designed at the kitchen table in their parents’ two-bedroom bungalow. And yet, in just under five years, Kate and Laura have become the most celebrated American designers working today. Their small company, which produces only a thousand pieces a year and has no outside financial backing and minimal profits—“What profit we make goes back into research and development, and into making samples for the next season,” their father, William (Perry) Mulleavy, who now acts as the C.F.O. and “business adviser,” wrote in an e-mail—has become one of the most talked-about (and imitated) labels in fashion. You might say the outsider artists have become consummate insiders. The question, now, is whether their reach can extend beyond the avant-garde.
Fifteen minutes before the show was to begin, more than half the models still had to be directed to a “spraying station,” where their boots were shellacked with leather paint. Two days earlier, the boots had arrived in a lighter shade of gray than the sisters had envisioned. They were sent to be re-dyed, but the paint kept rubbing off and had to be reapplied minutes before each model was launched down the runway. “I was trying to be, like, ‘Maybe it will look cool the way it is,’ because I knew it was going to be a total drama if we sprayed them,” Shirley Kurata, a stylist and a friend of the Mulleavys’, said. “But they were, like, ‘No, it’s not going to look good,’ and they were right.”
At twelve-thirty, a half hour late, the models began to glide past the audience, a crowd of fashion editors and celebrities (Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue; Olivier Zahm, the editor of Purple Fashion; the stylist Rachel Zoe; the hipster-actresses Milla Jovovich and Kirsten Dunst). The outfits paired with the extra-long boots were uniformly short—tunic-style dresses and knit miniskirts—and came in unobtrusive shades of gray, taupe, cream, and black, occasionally inflected with electric blue, dark and sea-foam greens, bronze, or mustard. The unvarying backdrop of the garments provided a canvas on which the sisters had created assemblages of fabric. Booth Moore, the Los Angeles Times fashion critic, wrote, “With this collection, I wouldn’t know whether to wear the dress or hang it on the wall.”
The arts-and-crafts theme was carried through knit skirts, dresses, and sweaters, which evoked shag carpets or latch-hook wall hangings. Some of the fabrics had been “marblized”—dipped in paint to produce a swirled effect. Not everyone was a fan of the sisters’ idiosyncratic methods, however. Cathy Horyn, the fashion critic for the New York Times, wrote in her review of the show, “All those scarred fabrics are essentially ornament; the underlying shapes don’t change much, and they’re not interesting. Indeed you wonder if they are bored or intimidated by the actual mechanics of design—cutting, setting a sleeve—and that what their clothes express isn’t technical virtuosity but inarticulateness.”
Most of the time, the Mulleavys’ dresses hover mysteriously at the point where balanced meets busy, and beautiful meets baroque. But their recent designs, while arresting, do not perform the simple duty of most women’s clothing—to make the wearer look either pretty or sexy. “The most unhappy Laura and I have ever been was when we heard that we made ‘a pretty dress,’ ” Kate told me. “We want to make people think, and, once you decide to do that, you will have people that won’t like what you’re doing.” Over time, their vision has grown darker, their clothing riskier, more deconstructed, punk, and gothic. Each collection has been stranger than the last, influenced by anime and horror films, and elements of S & M culture. “Rodarte is the fashion equivalent of a Basquiat,” a writer for the New York Observer remarked. “People in the know really love it, but to everyone else it’s inscrutable or a little bit ugly.”
Although their clothing is considered ready-to-wear, the sisters use couture-like methods. They often speak of “building” a dress. To create their garments, which tend to include a multitude of textiles (and finicky ones, like tulle, organza, leather, and lace), adornments (crystals, feathers, rosettes), and techniques (draping, pleating, dyeing), the Mulleavys work with a team of three seamstresses, a pattern-maker, a dyer, a leather worker, and three knitters. One mid-length yellow chiffon dress from the 2006 fall collection took a hundred and fifty hours to complete. The edge of each of its thirty-plus pleats was beaded, by hand, with vintage Swarovski crystals. The prices reflect the painstaking labor: a multicolored draped silk tulle gown from their 2009 spring collection that was hand-dyed and decorated with crystal beading across the bodice retailed for twenty-five thousand dollars; another draped silk tulle dress from the previous season, this one white, knee-length, wrapped with twine, and spattered a bloody horror-flick red (an effect that took a month to perfect), cost nine thousand dollars.
Rodarte garments are thus worn only by those with enough money to buy them (the socialite-dermatologist Lisa Airan, the San Francisco-based couture collector Christine Suppes) or enough influence to borrow them (the actresses Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton). Michelle Obama wore a demure taupe linen Rodarte dress to receive Queen Rania, of Jordan, at the White House, and was photographed in a poufy orange lamé Rodarte frock at a ceremony at the Copenhagen Opera House. Natalie Portman and Reese Witherspoon wore Rodarte to the 2009 Oscars. (Portman’s bubble-gum-pink Grecian-inspired strapless gown was a hit; Witherspoon’s royal-blue-and-black gown, with shoulder sashes that made her look as if she were wearing a Baby Björn, was not.) Many of the designers’ supporters are in the odd position of not being able to own Rodarte themselves. “I am not necessarily able to buy their clothes, because they’re on the high end of the price range, and I’m a working girl,” Julie Gilhart, the fashion director at Barneys, told me.
Neither Mulleavy sister has any formal fashion training. “We don’t know anything about what we’re doing but our instincts,” Kate says. As young girls, they became interested in clothing through films like “Bringing Up Baby” and “Gone with the Wind.” In high school, the sisters subscribed to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. But at Berkeley Kate majored in art history and Laura in English literature, after leaving her pre-med track (“I was always crying,” she says). “Fashion didn’t seem like a reality,” Laura told me. “It didn’t seem like an attainable job, like something you could do.” They signed up for a costume-design class together, which they both dropped. “Laura was, like, ‘I’m not doing this,’ and I remember I stayed a little longer,” Kate said. After a disastrous presentation in which she reënvisioned “Twelfth Night” as the movie “Shampoo,” Kate decided to leave the class, too. “I was, like, ‘No one gets my references to blow-dryers and Shakespeare, and I am so out of here.’ ”
The sisters learned basic sewing techniques from their mother, Victoria, an artist who painted, did ceramics, and created mosaics. (The name Rodarte, pronounced “Rodar-tay,” comes from her maiden name, Rodart; the “e” was dropped when her parents emigrated from Mexico.) “We had the kind of mom that was, like, ‘I want you to stay home for a week from school because you haven’t seen all the Hitchcock films,’ ” Kate said. Their father, a fourth-generation Californian and a botanist who identified a new species of fungus, is also detail-oriented and free-spirited. During the early years of their marriage, the Mulleavys lived in an unheated cabin in a redwood forest. The parents’ “rebellious” choices liberated their daughters. “They were doing things that were outside of perceptions of normal,” Kate told me. “They weren’t, like, part of this mainstream life style.”
After graduating, in January, 2002 (Kate stayed a semester longer, Laura left a semester early), the sisters moved back home. There they watched horror movies “literally for a year.” They also began reading couture-sewing books. By mid-2004, with money saved from a cancelled graduation trip to Italy and the sale of Kate’s collection of rare albums (a first pressing of the Velvet Underground’s self-titled début album, Lou Reed’s “Berlin,” X’s “Los Angeles”), they had cobbled together sixteen thousand five hundred dollars to start their line. Laura later contributed funds by waitressing at a local restaurant. I asked Kate what she did while her sister worked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was just thinking about stuff, I guess.” In six months, they had created seven dresses and three coats.
The long, slim dresses in this initial collection—flowing, ethereal, delicate, if somewhat precious—were modelled on the redwood trees of their childhood in Aptos, a small town near Santa Cruz. At the time, the sisters were interested in playing with texture, for which tree bark served as a metaphor; they pleated and tucked their garments like textile origami, fraying the edges with pinking shears. These methods gave their essentially classical gowns an unleashed quality. They sent a quirky, flattering note—a doll in a little armoire containing miniature paper versions of their seven dresses—to Cameron Silver, the proprietor of Decades, a vintage store in Los Angeles, asking him to view their collection. He agreed to meet with them and assess the clothes. “It could have been a Tim Gunn moment,” Silver says, alluding to the “Project Runway” host and the shoddy designs he has to endure. “But I was just blown away.”
Silver phoned buyers and editors in New York, and the Mulleavys made their first trip to Manhattan, where they schlepped their tiny collection around in a cardboard box. Women’s Wear Daily invited the sisters to bring their pieces to the magazine’s office; three days later, on February 3, 2005, their designs appeared on the cover of WWD, an auspicious (and unheard-of) début. Soon afterward, Anna Wintour turned up in Los Angeles for a viewing. “She said, ‘What you’re doing is very personal,’ ” Laura recalls. “ ‘You should keep it that way.’ Which I think is the best advice we’ve ever received from anybody.” Wintour has since become a tireless promoter of their work. In less than five years, Rodarte has been mentioned in Vogue dozens of times. “Vogue and some of the other magazines seem determined to keep them in front of us,” Cathy Horyn wrote in the Times.
Early one Sunday evening last February, on the eve of Fashion Week in Paris, Sarah Lerfel, the co-founder of Colette—a Parisian shop that sells rare designer labels, bizarre techno-gadgets, and T-shirts with peculiar sayings (“OCD,” “Art Damage,” “J’Aurais Dû Faire Finance”)—was leading Kate, Laura, and their publicist, Brian Phillips, on a tour of the store. The sisters were there to discuss the “pop-up” shop they would create in Colette’s second-floor retail-and-gallery space.
Like Anna Wintour, Lerfel was an early adopter of the Rodarte label, beginning with the 2006 fall collection, the Mulleavys’ second. “Colette was one of our first five stores,” Laura noted. (Rodarte mounted its first show in the fall of 2005, with its 2006 spring collection; runway time always anticipates civilian time by half a year.) During Paris Couture Week in 2006, Rodarte displayed three confections of organza and chiffon in the windows of Colette. Karl Lagerfeld stopped by and bought a black georgette-and-satin dress with a high neck and signature Rodarte “waves” fluttering down the bodice and at the cuffs, for his muse, Lady Amanda Harlech. “I saw this hand with amazing rings on it touching a dress,” recalls Kate, who, with Laura, happened to be in the store at the time. “And then I felt that hand tap me on the shoulder, and Lagerfeld said something like he thought the dresses were special, and he was going to buy one. I was in shock.”
Lerfel, a gamine Frenchwoman with close-cropped hair, led the group downstairs to the shop’s café. Kate pulled a crumpled piece of loose-leaf notebook paper out of a canvas tote printed with an image of Proust. “I kind of like the idea of creating a teen-age girl’s bedroom,” she said. “I thought we could do stuffed animals, like Teddy bears and giant rabbits, made of our knits.” Her voice shook a little; she was speaking with her hand in front of her mouth. “Kate doesn’t drive, so Laura drives her everywhere, and the payback is that Kate has to speak,” the artist Ari Marcopoulos told me. “ ‘You have to talk, because I’m driving you around,’ Laura will say. That’s how they work together.”
Kate mentioned some other ideas: several zines (small booklets of photocopied images) organized around different themes, and a set of mixtapes created by Thurston Moore, of the band Sonic Youth. The sisters are fond of collaborating with friends on various projects. These often consist of photo shoots and interviews in art-fashion journals—an esoteric universe whose members talk mainly to one another. The Colette show, which opened in October, included “art works” by several members of their posse: party hats by Autumn de Wilde, pillowcases by Miranda July, a gumball machine by the actor Jason Schwartzman.
Lerfel asked the sisters what they had in mind for the zines. “We want to do one with Ari,” Kate said, referring to Marcopoulos. “We have a mutual obsession with the West. I thought the others could be based on my obsessions. One of them is the flooding of Florence in the sixties. And then one is of the Dust Bowl, and Steinbeck, and when they had all those crazy things happening in the early thirties in the United States.”
Lerfel looked confused. “What?”
“The Dust Bowl.”
“Spell it?’ Lerfel asked.
“D-U-S-T Bowl,” Phillips said slowly. “I don’t know how you describe it.”
“It’s, like, basically the ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ you know, like in the Depression in the United States,” Kate explained.
The group discussed several other ideas before Lerfel’s expression grew serious. “What you have to know is it’s coming su-pere fast, and it’s something from now to work on non-stop, because we cannot have last-minute sheeping,” Lerfel said, her tone parental. “I talked to you about some of these things, like, two years ago, and that’s the thing which really, really scares me, because I know you’re passionate, and you love everything and everything—”
“No, we are going to do it,” Phillips reassured her.
“Brian, we have to do this—I’m dying,” Kate said.
“We’re going to do it,” Phillips repeated.
“He’s going to monitor us,” Kate told Lerfel. “Don’t worry.”
The Rodarte studio is a modest L-shaped loft apartment in the former Federal Reserve Building in downtown Los Angeles, containing two drafting tables, at which Kate and Laura sit, and a small desk in one corner where Andy, their lone full-time employee, quietly makes phone calls. Between three and five unpaid interns scuttle around; mostly, they appear to be occupied with fetching coffee. With its two walls of art books arranged by color (“Laura does that,” Kate said), its bathroom filled with toiletries for the occasional all-nighter, and its many stuffed animals and toys, the space has the feel of a dorm room. On the refrigerator in the galley kitchen, a note from Anna Wintour has been tacked up: “Dear Kate and Laura, Thanks for the flowers. I’m happy you are as pleased with the May issue as I am.”
When I visited on Memorial Day, the Mulleavys were at work on their 2010 spring collection, which would be shown in September. Off to one side were two large bulletin boards on which the sisters had pinned a series of inspirational images photocopied from books: pictures of Degas’s famous ballerina sculpture, two paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, California condors, and the atomic bomb being tested in the Nevada desert. Each collection begins with a constellation of such images, and from there a loose theme arises. The muted colors and marbled fabrics in the 2009 fall collection were intended to resemble granite, slate, marble: “the materials used in the structure of a home,” the designers wrote in an e-mail. The idea arrived when the sisters drove by a cluster of dilapidated houses alongside the freeway. For their 2008 fall collection, which was inspired by Japanese horror films, the textiles were meant to look as though they were bleeding or “covering a seeping wound.”
The sisters spend months either inventing their own “techniques” or, more commonly, working with artisans to alter fabric by, say, pleating, beading, or dyeing it. Only then do they move on to the designs. Kate does all the formal sketching. “I can’t draw,” Laura says. In a 2006 article in Vogue, Kate referred to their process as “manipulating simpler textiles into really complicated things.”
For the upcoming collection, the Mulleavys had decided on a new technique. “We’re going to burn everything; it’s like opening Pandora’s box,” Kate said. They were testing scraps of fabric to see how various materials would respond. The results would offer an antidote to “high gloss, high fashion, glamour, put-together, shiny, perfect—everything too exact,” as Laura put it. Kate added, “The other day, we were laughing that if we could take our clothes and bury them, and in ten years pull them out, we would actually be satisfied.” (Another designer had beat them to it: in 1993, for his graduate collection at Central St. Martins, Hussein Chalayan buried silk dresses and later exhumed them.)
Both women were seated in desk chairs, with several piles of fabric samples at their feet. For the next four hours, they sorted through them. Laura recorded their verdicts in her laptop, while Kate ate a sandwich and absent-mindedly pulled at the skin on her neck.
Laura held up a scrap of beige silk. “I think this one is retarded,” Kate told her. “Bor-ing.”
Next, a shiny piece of terra-cotta-colored lamé. “I feel like it’s a little fussy,” Kate said.
Of a strip of rough brown linen with quasi-leopard-print spots: “Too eighties Mudd Club.”
Laura held up a swatch of cream jersey with a raised, wavy texture that suggested sand dunes. “Desert-y,” she said to herself.
So far, all the designers knew about this collection’s theme was that the desert and condors would play a part; they had travelled to Death Valley earlier that spring with their friend Johnson Hartig, the designer of the label Libertine. They were searching without success for an example of a color that they called “condor red,” a chalky, dusty red that would resemble the faded, rubbery skin of a condor’s head and wattle.
“Ready? Because this is out of control,” Kate said, waving a square of embroidered gray tulle in Laura’s face. “If this were white with rust on it, it would be off the charts,” she added.
Laura began typing furiously on her laptop. She was e-mailing a mill. “Ask them if we can customize,” Kate told her. When a color or print or texture exists only in their imaginations, they work with a fabric mill to develop it. These transactions can be difficult. Small lots of fabric tend to be a low priority, and the mills tack on surcharges.
Laura pulled a sample of sea-foam-green polyester from a little heap near her feet.
“I hate that,” Kate said sourly.
“Me, too.”
“Like, why do they even make it?”
“Should we burn it?” Laura wanted to know. “Who has the lighter?” She got up and walked a few feet to the bathroom with the sea-foam-green bit in her hand. The chemical smell of burning polyester wafted through the studio. “Stinky,” she said. Back in her chair, she rooted around on the floor until she found a scrap of silver lamé.
“I hate that,” Kate said.
“It’s awful. Let’s burn it.” She held it away from her body and torched it with the lighter. The edges of the fabric began to flicker and curl. As the flame seared through the material, it left a scorched lunar landscape in its wake.
“Cool,” Laura said.
If there is any doubt about Vogue’s hand in anointing new designers, one has only to look to the industry’s prize circuit, which provides an infusion of cash and prestige at a critical moment in a fledgling career. Since 2006, the Mulleavys have been awarded approximately two hundred and ten thousand dollars in fashion-industry prizes—including twenty-five thousand dollars for the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award for emerging designers, and fifty thousand dollars for being named runner-up in the 2006 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund competition. The year Rodarte won the Ecco Domani Award, Sally Singer, Vogue’s fashion-features director, served as one of six judges. At Anna Wintour’s suggestion, the Gap hired the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winner, Doo-Ri Chung, and the runners-up Thakoon Panichgul and the Mulleavy sisters, to design a version of the classic white shirt.
In June, Rodarte won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award (a.k.a. “the C.F.D.A.”) for Womenswear Designer of the Year, the most prestigious accolade in the fashion industry. A C.F.D.A. win raises a designer’s profile, increasing the number of stores that carry the line and, possibly, the number of people who buy it. (Approximately forty-two stores currently sell Rodarte.) Winners are sometimes installed as creative directors of a fashion house, as Nicolas Ghesquiere was at Balenciaga, or Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, or Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent. “The Mulleavys are ripe for a house who might be looking for a designer,” Wintour told me. “A place like Schiaparelli, which is just sitting there waiting for the economy to be better—I think they’d be perfect for that.”
Some would argue that there is a downside to being the pets of Vogue. For the April, 2008, issue, the sisters submitted to a four-month weight-loss program at the urging of the editors. The magazine provided a trainer and a meal-delivery service at no cost. Kate and Laura detailed the experience in journals, the contents of which were published. “I hadn’t realized, though, how many vegetables I never ate,” Laura wrote, “and it is rather shocking how much cauliflower we get. I will E-mail them I prefer broccoli.” A media furor ensued; the cool kids were picking on the overweight nerds. An article in Radar noted, “Like the passive-aggressive frenemy she is, you see, Vogue was just worried about the husky pair.”
“The point of it was that, when you’re basically a workaholic, how do you take care of yourself?” Kate said, as we sat in the sisters’ studio one recent midweek evening. On the kitchen counter were discarded Starbucks cups and a plastic carton of store-bought mini-cheesecakes, several of which had been eaten. Though the sisters lost fifty pounds combined, they have gained much of it back. I asked if they had continued with any part of the regimen. “I never ate breakfast in my entire life, and I know it was really messing with my mind,” Laura offered, looking up from her neat rows of minuscule doodles (“They’re hearts, but I’m making them look like flies”). Kate added, “Like, now I would try to eat a banana in the morning.”
The Mulleavys do not see why their bodies are relevant. “It’s assumed, I think, that if you’re a woman designer you must be designing clothes for yourself,” Kate said with a sigh. There are a number of women designers who have been the best ambassadors for their designs: Coco Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, and Miuccia Prada among them. Most days, though, Kate wears a gray T-shirt, Laura a gray sweatshirt. Their lack of personal style—what Cameron Silver calls “their goober factor”—is a source of curiosity for the fashion people around them: Is their aesthetic cultivated or in earnest?
The sisters can come off as childlike and naïve, but their actions indicate a sharp sense of how the fashion business works. In addition to having befriended powerful editors, they have sent dresses to edgy, artistic women like Cecelia Dean and Kim Gordon, and have allowed only the right sort of actress to wear their clothes—Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst—while refusing those who might tarnish the label’s highbrow finish. “Everyone wants to wear Rodarte, but they don’t want everyone to wear Rodarte,” Silver said. “We know who we would like to see representing a collection,” Laura said, rather cryptically, “and that world has to be very solid. So we’re careful.”
“They’re very smart, very savvy girls—don’t be put off by that naïve façade that they have,” Wintour told me. “They’re savvy enough that they contacted me in the beginning,” Silver said. “They may project a quality that’s a mysterious naïveté—not that it’s a shtick for them. . . .” he trailed off. “But, at the end of the day, they really know what they’re doing.”
In August, when it was announced in the press that the Mulleavy sisters would be designing a fifty-five-piece collection for Target, no item of which would cost more than $79.99, fashionable young women began anticipating the arrival of the designers’ down-market offerings with the avidity of fishermen awaiting a salmon run. “Start arranging your carpool now,” one blogger wrote.
The collection, which does not much resemble Rodarte aesthetically or materially, arrived in stores and online late last month. (In both venues, the merchandise was almost entirely gone in a matter of hours; shortly thereafter, it began to appear on eBay, where it fetched several times the original price.) On a practical level, the items are what Kate and Laura felt “every girl should have.” There’s a striped sailor shirt, a denim jacket, a little black dress. On a more abstract plane, the inspiration for the collection was three of the sisters’ favorite films and “the women who star in them”—Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde,” and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude.” Nothing was to seem indigenous to a time period. “We did not want it to look vintage,” Laura said. But although the collection contains several covetable pieces, too much of it—the slip dresses that recall thrift-store lingerie, the cheap mesh that channels Annie Potts’s prom dress in “Pretty in Pink”—looks like resale fare reimagined: Goodwill for people who might not want to brave the wilds of Goodwill’s racks. The proliferation of bows seems a stand-in for Rodarte’s exquisite detailing, but without the usual mystery of these details. And, of course, the clothes do not offer the intrinsic thrill of classic Rodarte: owning a piece of wearable art.
“The cost of a garment wholesale for Target is less money than half a yard of any textile we use in our clothes—it’s such a different price point, for sure,” Laura told me recently. Kate added, “We definitely didn’t look at this as a way to reinterpret what we do on the runway,” and said that they were excited to contribute to “street fashion,” which they experienced while growing up near Santa Cruz, with its skaters, surfers, punks, and Hare Krishnas, each subculture evinced by its clothes. “Rodarte becomes part of a larger world, which had so much influence on us to begin with,” Kate said. Later, I asked Trish Adams, the vice-president of merchandising for Target, whether the store’s customers would need to be educated about Rodarte. “At a thousand dollars, maybe someone doesn’t understand Rodarte, but at eighty dollars maybe they will understand it,” she told me. “They can just wear it to a party without having it be this major investment.” In other words, at eighty dollars a buyer doesn’t have to understand Rodarte; she can afford not to.
At Rodarte’s spring, 2010, show, in mid-September, Tavi Gevinson, a thirteen-year-old fashion blogger from the Chicago suburbs, modelled prototypes from the Target collection, including a rayon camisole and a lace cardigan, both the color of support hose, and a navy-blue tulle skirt. The real models, their hair overlaid with matted black wool, their lips lined in black, their arms and necks painted with black tribal tattoos (on which forty makeup artists labored for four hours), were dressed in designs that, like their makeup, gestured heavy-handedly toward primitivism. The story, which the Mulleavys had finally arrived at shortly before the show, was about “this girl who kind of became part of a ravaged landscape, and then, for some reason, she burns alive and is reborn as a California condor.”
All the clothing had been burned, stained, shredded, sandpapered, or in some way “ruined.” The sisters had worked with an “ager” from the film industry. “For the purple-y fabric, after we had finished custom-designing the print with the mill in Italy, and we’d received the fabric, we had to sandpaper the entire thing,” Kate later told me. “Then we had to stain it, and burn it, and treat the edges with a razor blade. And that was just one textile.” Each dress, according to Laura, contained “at least nine different fabrics”—silk and linen and leather, as well as velvet, cheesecloth, crystal-encrusted cotton, sequinned lace, and a few that Kate and Laura had invented, like “wool cobweb” and “bird skin” (a kind of corrugated fake leather).
In an effort to conjure a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, fans had been rigged to disseminate a thick yellow vapor, which viewers had to wave away in order to see the clothes, and the runway had been sprinkled with a dark sand-like substance. (The grit underfoot, along with spindly six-inch black leather high heels, again created with Nicholas Kirkwood, proved to be a dangerous combination—all the models moved lugubriously, as if at a funeral procession, and one wiped out.) The first few dresses, made of gauzy, threadbare cheesecloth and wool in colors not much seen in high fashion since Cobain-era grunge (black-and-white plaid, puce, and a dull, flat tan), were twisted and gathered in an apparently random manner. There were also dresses that consisted of an explosion of fringe—macramé, crochet knit, strands that looked like those fuzzy yarn hair ribbons that Goody used to make—that brought to mind streamers at a car wash, or the beaded curtains of the seventies. But, creative as it all was, it was difficult to imagine any woman suiting up in tatters for a formal event, let alone a business function. Even for an unconventional occasion, the ragged clothes seemed too fragile for the thousands of dollars they would cost.
The sighting of Renaud Dutreil, the chairman of L.V.M.H. North America, seemed to bode something for the future of the Mulleavy sisters. (Ever since, the rumor has circulated that L.V.M.H. is looking to acquire or take a stake in the brand, as it did with Donna Karan and Marc Jacobs.) But the critics were lukewarm, with several lamenting the sisters’ continued descent into the dreary basement of high-fashion goth. WWD wrote, “As remarkable as this collection was, it would be nice to see them come back into the light and bring a few more approachable looks with them.” Robin Givhan, of the Washington Post, called the collection “indulgent and depressing,” and said that “it did not offer women clothes—not in any meaningful way. . . . Everything else was a dazzling display of technique—put to no functional end.”
But Ikram, the owner of the Chicago boutique of the same name, says that Rodarte’s 2010 spring collection has been extremely well received by her customers, who, she notes, want “a beautiful dress made out of cheesecloth, with holes in it artfully arranged.” As she told me, “They don’t like it, they love it, and they’re paying money to have that hole. You’ll never have the same placement twice. That’s what makes those pieces special—distressing them, giving them life, giving them history.”
Kate and Laura were, as usual, unfazed by either praise or criticism. “If we failed,” Kate said, two weeks later, when we met for breakfast at the Raymond, their favorite restaurant in Pasadena, “people would have focussed on just one element, like that everything is burnt. Instead, they focussed on the story. The techniques were never meant to overpower the final result. In the end, when you looked, you just understood the world.” ♦
