It was the week before Christmas, and Laura and Kate Mulleavy, the young women behind the fashion label Rodarte, were going all out fabulous—or at least their version of it. The look? High-waisted jeans and a Clone Wars T-shirt on Kate, 33. Sweatpants on Laura, 31. Blue moccasins on both. The place: the Derby in Arcadia, near their hometown of Pasadena, a horse-racing-themed steak house that goes bonkers for Santa this time of year. The time? Six thirty P.M., prime time for the town’s seniors. Our fast-talking, seventysomething waitress, with a flashy blue tie and over-the-top blue earrings to match, plopped down Kate’s hot toddy and got down to business—hustling the homemade earrings she sells on the side. “We have peppermint, and we have gold and red balls,” she rattled off, hoping to make the transaction as fast and as easy as possible.
But the Mulleavys were conflicted.
“Which ones do you think I should pick, Laura?” wondered Kate, fingering the flimsy baubles as if they were Tiffany diamonds.
“Ooh, I like the red balls,” said Laura.
“What about the snowflakes?”
“Get the snowflakes because I got the red ones.”
“Sorry,” said Kate. “They’re all so cool. I can’t pick.”
I mentioned to the waitress that this was high praise, her new fans being two of the hottest young designers in the world. After all, their avant-garde creations have won them nearly every fashion accolade, and they’ve got a cult following among cool, A-list actresses, including Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon, Keira Knightley, Kirsten Dunst, Chloë Sevigny, and Elle and Dakota Fanning.
The waitress gave the girls a skeptical once-over. “Oh. O.K.,” she said, trying to be polite and promptly moving on to the next table.
The girls let out a laugh. “She’s like, ‘Next,’ ” said Kate.
Truth is, no one would peg them as fashion designers. While they’re both striking—the zaftig Kate has a heavy-banged, young-Grace Slick vibe, Laura a more creamy-skinned, angular beauty—they carry themselves like high-school wallflowers. They slouch; they shuffle; both appear a little pigeon-toed. They live far from the fashion swirl—with their parents—and they believe a lot of other people would benefit from living with their parents, too. They greet people with hugs—or not—but never with the kiss-on-either-cheek thing that has spread from Europe to the New York fashion world. “If you double-kissed someone in L.A., they’d be like, What?” says Kate. Their idea of a crazy good time isn’t partying with Kate Moss. It’s raiding the gift shop at the Huntington Library for Christmas ornaments. They’re not interested in who’s up, who’s down, or who’s gotten fat. “They’re not talking fashion gossip,” says Jeffrey Deitch, director of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), who’s become a friend. “I don’t know if they know any fashion gossip.”
They are, in short, fashion’s outsider nerds. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—they just so happen to be doing more interesting things with clothing than anyone else these days, pushing its relevance from the racks and runway into the realms of other art forms: film, painting, and now opera. The new direction started with the movie Black Swan, in which their mad, beautiful confections turned the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake on its head. Those costumes were promptly put on view at MOCA. Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) just exhibited a group of the sisters’ gowns inspired by the frescoes of Fra Angelico at San Marco, in Florence. This spring comes their most prestigious project yet: designing the costumes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s production of Don Giovanni at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and working in close collaboration with none other than the man who built the building—iconic architect Frank Gehry, who’s doing the sets. The magnitude of Mozart and Gehry—it’s all a little daunting for the sisters right now. “But I’m not going to lie,” said Kate, using a favorite expression. “Designing for character is so exciting.”
The sisters tend not to talk specifics about projects they’re working on. There are too many disparate strands happening at once; everything’s constantly in flux until the last minute. But to grasp how they work, there are a few things to understand, first and foremost that they act as a single unit. They share friends, they share an e-mail address, and, as if they were Siamese twins conjoined at the head, they share fascinations, which is pretty much all things enchanted, child-like, macabre, primordial, nostalgic, wild, or scientific. Ideas, half-ideas, fleeting notions are bubbling in their minds constantly. While their meandering, dotty conversation is endearing and enlightening, following along is an exercise in stamina.
Few adults can get more moved by a birdhouse, for example. “I was waking up,” recalled Laura. “These birds just go zooming in; they go swooping into the chimney of the house [next door]. I got up and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s the most adorable birdhouse on that chimney! … There’s a heart cut out of it! This is where they fly in.’ ”
“It’s like a Snow White little cottage,” added Kate. She whips out her iPhone to show me a picture. “This is the birdhouse. Come on! It’s so cute!”
Don’t even get them started on the natural wonders of Northern California, like redwood trees.
“The oldest ones are 2,200 years old,” Laura called out from behind the wheel, driving down Route 110.
“I mean, can you imagine?” said Kate.
Oh, Kate, but what about the sequoias?
“I’m not going to lie. The sequoias are right up there.” Kate consults her iPhone. “Are you guys ready to have your mind blown? Sequoias are 56 feet in diameter!”
And don’t forget about the California condors, Laura.
“They’re vultures. They feed off deer meat,” Laura answers.
“They were getting lead poisoning from the bullets,” said Kate. “They’re very mystical.”
Laura: “They’re majestic.”
Again, Kate with the iPhone pictures. “I’m showing you this because if you go [to Big Sur] one day you might get lucky and see one!” They can go on like this for hours, analyzing, informing, loudly effusing over the sunspot photos taken by NASA, the night colors of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, a famous photograph of President Lincoln, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, “one of the greatest movies of all time.”
It all can seem a little Grey Gardens. The girls don’t think about dating, for example, because not only would a guy have to more or less date the other sister as well, “he’d have to date all our obsessions too,” says Laura. It’s hard not to picture them 50 years from now, two spinsters walking down the street trading one odd remark after another and collecting strange looks. But, in fact, these seemingly random topics of conversation are their memories and lifeblood, and the very foundation of their work. Consider that California condor, the bird whose near extinction became a political issue during their youth. Their spring-2010 collection—in which they applied a pastiche of materials with a hands-on, couture method—was all vulture. It featured claw belt buckles, heels with crazy tentacles, cobwebby wool skirts, and fabrics that had been shredded, burned, sandpapered, or painted. The sisters built a story around it: a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which women were burned alive and returned to life as California condors, who clothed themselves in whatever rags were left.
When you wear a dress by Rodarte, says Natalie Portman, an early fan who’s now a close friend, “you get the sense you’re wearing a piece of art. People say that about fashion a lot, and it sounds hollow. But with them it’s true. They’re so aware of art history, and film, and literature, and contemporary art. They really are referencing genuine inspirations … ideas and thoughts and other pieces of art and things in nature. They make pieces you can talk about or think about.”
One of the chief sources is their childhood, spent in Aptos, a small town outside of Santa Cruz, with their Mexican-Italian artist mother and botanist father, who is a fifth-generation Californian of Irish descent. (The two met at Humboldt State University in 1969, and later briefly lived in a cabin without heat.) Santa Cruz provided the girls with a view into the edgy subcultures of skaters, surfers, punks, and Hare Krishnas, while the landscape of Aptos—with its redwood forests, beaches covered in eucalyptus leaves, and mustard fields—fairly soaked into their souls, becoming perhaps their most crucial, emotional touchstone. That and movies. To their mother, nothing was more critical to their education than watching old movies. Their interest in fashion came from the characters in films like Bringing Up Baby and Gone with the Wind. When their mother gave them sketchpads, Laura filled the pages mapping her house, while Kate did fashion sketches.
After attending Berkeley, where Kate studied art history and Laura studied literature, they returned home (by then Pasadena) and spent a year watching horror movies and reading couture books. Kate sold her record collection, and, with the $16,500 in proceeds, they sat down at the kitchen table and started making their first collection: six dresses and one long, slim gown that played with strips of fabric and the bark effects of redwoods. They re-created them in paper miniatures and sent them in a doll’s armoire to the L.A. vintage-clothing store Decades. The owner, Cameron Silver, was floored and alerted the fashion media back East. Cut to February 2005, when the dresses landed on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. Soon thereafter, the sisters learned they would be receiving a studio visit from *Vogue’*s Anna Wintour, an event most young women would anticipate with sheer panic, if not a crash diet. The sisters did nothing except prepare the clothes and get themselves a name—Rodarte (pronounced Ro-dar-tay), their mother’s maiden name.
“I look back on it now and think, That’s the first thing we ever made. How did that meeting ever happen?” says Kate. “We were in such a raw state. We didn’t have friends or know people in the industry. We didn’t know how to sell clothes. We didn’t know how clothes went in a store.” Wintour might have said something like: Make the clothes prettier; make them more accessible. The girls wouldn’t have known what to do with such advice and might have thrown in the towel. Instead, Wintour told them that their clothes were personal and they should keep them that way. The sisters were over the moon. “That’s the thing that’s defined us,” says Kate. “If we didn’t have that advice, who knows where we’d be.”
The fairy tale continued. On their first trip to Paris, while at the hip boutique Colette, where they’d installed a pop-up collection, there was Karl Lagerfeld picking out a few of their wild and beautiful creations for his muse, Amanda Harlech. He promptly invited them to a party at his Paris apartment, where they were photographed by legendary fashion editor Suzy Menkes. She said, in effect, that she was witnessing something special and that she would never let this photograph out of her hands.
“It was so surreal,” recalls Laura.
“It was as if I were a film student and I was suddenly hanging around with Martin Scorsese,” says Kate. They went on to win all the important fashion awards, including back-to-back Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. (The award recognizes the industry’s top creative talent.) Their earliest fans were the edgiest of New York’s beau monde: gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Andy Warhol partner and original art-world “It girl” Paige Powell, Visionaire co-founder Cecilia Dean, dermatologist-about-town Dr. Lisa Airan—all of whom could afford to drop $9,000 on a dress. The movie stars followed. And then Michelle Obama began wearing Rodarte, too.
Distinct in the fashion world, they did it on their own terms—no formal training, no financial backing, no compromises—just them and a small group of seamstresses and artisans. More amazing, they did it with no drama and no self-loathing. “I’ve often said they are the healthiest crazy people I know,” says photographer Autumn de Wilde, one of their closest friends, who’s been documenting their work from the beginning. “They’re so accepting of themselves. So confident without being arrogant A lot of female artists in their 20s are so concerned with what’s wrong with them that they miss a good 10 years of holding the reins and racing forward.”
Despite the naïveté and lack of emotional baggage, a savvy streak runs through the sisters as well. “They have a beautiful innocence, but they’re also whip-smart,” says de Wilde. “You can’t predict the one you’re going to get—the wide-eyed child or the leader.” Fast learners, they have been quick to identify who does what best in the business. In 2008, for example, when they felt that their shows needed to be kicked up a notch, they went straight to Alexandre de Betak, known as “the Fellini of fashion” for his over-the-top, beautiful work with Dior. “We begged him,” says Laura. “I admire him so much because he never, never accepts or understands the word ‘no,’ which is the way Kate and I think, which means everything’s possible.” Like having models walk down a runway covered in colored smoke.
It’s the same with the movie stars who wear their clothes and have built a cult following around Rodarte. “I don’t know why, but all these people are very fascinating, interesting people. They’re creative; they’re interested in art. They’re also fun,” says Kate, who insists their illustrious fans are a self-selecting group. “I think the people who like our clothes, more often than not we get along with them in real life. If we’re all in the same room together, we usually have something to talk about.” Indeed, not only Portman but also Dunst and Elle Fanning have become their close friends, leading some fashion people to carp that the sisters are just as star-obsessed as the next narcissistic fashion designer—don’t let the naïve act mislead you. De Wilde insists that’s not the case, explaining, “They’re not fooled by bullshit frivolity, but they have a childhood attraction to meeting great artists.”
So, what if Kim Kardashian calls up and wants to borrow a couple of dresses for her and her sisters? The sisters shift around a little awkwardly and go into P.R. mode. “We have one set of samples, so we want to be careful with how much they go out Once that’s been worn in a public sense, another person that’s public can’t wear it.” Laura remembers aloud that Britney Spears wore Rodarte on one of her album covers. “But she bought it,” she quickly adds for clarification. “She bought it.”
As it happened, it was Portman who would introduce them to the next chapter of their career: designing costumes—in this case, for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a movie that fit their sensibility perfectly. “I’d seen how balletic so many of their dresses were at that time,” recalls Portman. “I showed them to Darren. He was like, This is … yeah, amazing.” There was already a costume designer working on the film, Amy Westcott, but Rodarte would take on the more central theatrical pieces. Appreciating their knack for storytelling and knowledge of horror movies (they’d already built a runway collection around them), Aronofsky trusted the Mulleavy sisters to take “Swan Lake to a new level.” The sisters were intent on maintaining a level of Swan Lake tradition, however. “We wanted to celebrate all the beautiful things about ballet,” says Laura. From there, they focused on Portman’s character, designing the striking pieces that would reflect her emotional breakdown from pristine maiden to possessed, murderous beast.
It was one of the most talked-about movies of 2010. Fox Searchlight, in anticipation of Oscar season, didn’t hesitate to bring attention to Rodarte’s costumes, and the Mulleavy sisters, demonstrating that savvy streak—some might say ambition—weren’t shy about talking to the press about their work. As it happened, Westcott’s name was barely mentioned, to the point where most people assumed that Kate and Laura Mulleavy were the movie’s only costume designers. Westcott struck back, calling the girls “two people using their considerable self-publicizing resources to loudly complain about their credit once they realized how good the film is I tried to put aside my ego while being airbrushed from history in all of their interviews, as I’m just not that kind of person anyway.”
When asked about Westcott’s complaints, the sisters demonstrate tough, knowing diplomacy. “Our work speaks for itself,” says Laura. “I know what we can do as designers, and I know anyone looking at our work understands that there’s a direct link between what we did in that film and what we do and have done in the past. We were brought in to create the world that needed to be created for the film. She [Westcott] was brought in to handle the things she could source.” Translation: We did the interesting stuff.
Jeffrey Deitch, one of the country’s most visible art-world taste-makers, thought so, too. Impressed by their sculptural form, texture, and power to move, he promptly mounted those pieces at the L.A. County Museum of Art, where the lines, he says, went around the block. To him, the sisters are at the forefront of “the freshest thing going on in our culture today, this expanded view of what art is. It’s no longer just pictures on a wall in a gallery.”
Thus it’s no surprise that in December, at LACMA, in front of Christ on the Cross with Saints, by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, a collection of 10 gowns by Rodarte was displayed. In candy-colored pastels, they were inspired by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco, the friary in Florence in which he lived. The project, which was on view through early February, began with a request from the Italian fashion company Pitti Immagine to come to Florence and mount something—anything—that would reflect the city. Obsessed with Fra Angelico since they were teenagers, the Mulleavys visited San Marco and were brought to tears. “Stendhal wrote about this experience in Florence,” says Kate. “Your first time there, you basically experience this weird mania, an extreme high and extreme low.” The Mulleavy sisters had found their inspiration. Painted in the bedrooms of the friars, the frescoes, which feature classically draped figures from the life of Christ, convey an intense solitude, serenity, and austerity. The sisters boldly took the Renaissance figures into the realm of contemporary couture: employing their skewed take on perfect pleating; integrating feathers, Swarovski crystals, sequins, and hand-molded Easter lilies; and adding bold Bernini-esque accessories like breastplates, headpieces, and crazy belts.
With Don Giovanni at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Rodarte will likely give Mozart a similarly modern jolt. In a sense, the matchup is a natural. It is to be performed in May in Gehry’s undulating and majestic Walt Disney Concert Hall, and will be conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the young Venezuelan heartthrob who is bringing classical music to new audiences. The idea had its genesis one rainy day at a Starbucks in Berlin, when Los Angeles Philharmonic president Deborah Borda, Dudamel, and his wife, Eloísa Knife Maturen, were dreaming up future projects. Dudamel shared his belief that it’s important for symphony orchestras to perform opera, specifically Mozart, and suggested enlisting Gehry to do the sets, or installations, or whatever they would be. Given that the Disney hall is not an opera house—with no curtain or proscenium—it wasn’t obvious. His wife chimed in with the idea of involving fashion designers.
Gehry was immediately on board and the Philharmonic left it to him to choose the designer. He called Anna Wintour for some recommendations. “They were my natural selection for the L.A. Philharmonic when Frank approached me,” says Wintour, recalling the conversation. “They’ve shown that they can create fashion magic on the runway and the movie screen, and their unique blend of quirky individuality, together with their hands-on couture approach and sense of craftsmanship, suggest that they are also the perfect choice to design for the opera.”
The sisters couldn’t believe their good fortune. It turns out they had a strong personal connection. Their maternal grandmother, who’d been sent by her parents in Italy to live with an uncle in New York during the Depression, became an opera singer. “She would have thought this was the coolest thing ever,” says Kate.
An hour into their first meeting with Gehry, which was bubbling with nervous energy, the young women knew he was a kindred spirit. Like Gehry, says Laura, “we have such abstract jobs that you really have to do a lot of pre-visualization. When he says, ‘I have this, but I’m not there yet,’ I get that. A lot of people don’t I think that we’re all more subtle thinkers We don’t need to overly talk about it, to explain it. Like, you see something and then abstract from it, and then that’s it. We could end up talking about something [unrelated] for an hour and then realize, ‘Oh, O.K., well, I feel like we’ve made great progress today.’ And maybe we talked about it for a split second, but then, that was all we needed.” The sense of being simpatico is mutual. “Kate and Laura’s work reminds me of my early days,” says Gehry. “It is free and fearless and not precious.”
So what will the costumes look like? On a late-December day at their studio, in downtown Los Angeles—a cramped, windowless space with a few interns, racks of previous collections, thousands of books, a collection of weird dolls—the Mulleavy sisters stood in front of a big bulletin board, on which they’d mapped out the scenes and characters from Don Giovanni with index cards. They professed to be struggling with the title character, and how to make opera’s most famous seducer fresh. The velvet-and-heels look of the past is out of the question, they explained. Absurdly, I tried to engage them in a brainstorming session. Then what about a really realistic take on what a modern lady-killer would wear? Like jeans and some hipster T-shirt? The girls laughed—Wow, that’s lame. Would it help to think of a real person as a model? (A young Warren Beatty? John Mayer?) “Someone at the Phil asked us the same thing,” said Laura. Then, in unison: “We were like, ‘No.’ ”
A typical creative meeting with the sisters, reports Deborah Borda, goes something like this: “Well, let’s dress the chorus all in white. No, let’s not dress them at all. Yes, let’s dress them, but let’s dress them in paper and we’ll project things onto them.”
It makes sense, in a way, that this is all happening in Los Angeles, a city that many believe has surpassed New York in terms of artistic vibrancy. De Wilde articulates why that might be. “In L.A., there’s no real center. You build your own city. It can be the loneliest place on earth. It can be a party. You can transform it for yourself.” Looking out onto the Sierra Madre, as they made their way back from their studio to Pasadena, Kate said, “Living in L.A., there is this underlying sense of freedom. You can get on the road and find yourself in a different primordial landscape. Joshua Tree National Park or the tallest trees in the world. Even if you don’t do these things, having the knowledge is a liberating thing.”
Clearly, the Mulleavy sisters have tapped into something that resonates with other artists. A new social circle has popped up around them, which includes director Spike Jonze, writer-directors Mike Mills (Beginners) and Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know). “It’s the most exciting new creative circle I’ve seen,” says Deitch. Portman describes a recent Halloween party she went to at their house in Pasadena: “Being part Mexican, they have a big appreciation for skeletons and the dead, a post-graveyard aesthetic. Their mom cooked for everyone. It was the coolest people in L.A., myself not included, people so hip I’m too scared to talk to them. With 5,000 kids around. Hip, but also a family thing.”
And so it seems the nerds have become the cool people—by simply sticking to their guns. That’s a fantasy we can all appreciate.
