[DosViolines]

Part 2/2

As they develop each collection, the designers distill these far-flung visual references and atmospheric descriptions down to concise design elements. Previous collections have been variously inspired by Edward Weston’s 1930s photographs of Charis Wilson and the California landscape; “Suspiria,” the 1977 film by the baroque horror-maestro Dario Argento; and contemporary Japanese animation from Studio Ghibli. But when concepts are refined and ultimately given form as garments, the original allusions are worn lightly: a celadon bias-cut satin evokes woodland memory; a stream of blood red spills down a custom-dyed silk.

At Gagosian Gallery, the show will be produced by Bureau Betak, the special-events company whose client list has included Victoria’s Secret and Christian Dior Couture. “With Rodarte, there’s not really an official stylist position,” says Alexandre de Betak, who has worked with the company for the past two seasons. For young designers who don’t have their own store and do little advertising, a fashion show, de Betak says, can really establish an identity and history for them. “Their craftsmanship and artistry are incredible,” he says. “They know what they are doing. They’re obsessive and detail-oriented, and they get very well-selected advice from people.”

Bureau Betak says its fee for the Rodarte show is less than the usual rate. And, in fact, the entire production of the Rodarte show is heavily subsidized. Sponsorship from Lexus Hybrid Living, MAC Cosmetics, Aveda and Swarovski provide Rodarte with superb collaborators: makeup, through MAC, is directed by lead artist James Kaliardos; hair, in association with Aveda, is designed by Odile Gilbert. “People are helping Rodarte because they know they are helping to create designers,” de Betak says. “Kate and Laura are also the kind of people you get a creative kick working with. And we all need that.”

Since Rodarte first appeared on the scene six seasons ago, the fashion press has been surprised and often captivated by the unexpected wit and painstaking delicacy of the work from the Mulleavy sisters: the sheer layered skirts with exposed hand-pinked edges floating nimbly as clouds; or ravaged cobweb stockings puddling into aggressive saber-toothed stilettos festooned with studs, buckles and frantic claws. “These are the most fantastic high heels/weapons,” wrote Cecilia Dean, the Visionaire editor and a Rodarte client and fan. “They’re fun to wear and really scare off the creeps in Hell’s Kitchen where I live.”

The story of the Mulleavy sisters has also proved enchanting and perplexing. Raised by an artist mother and a botanist father, Kate and Laura grew up mostly in Aptos, Calif. When they were teenagers, their father was hired to develop a method for growing morels, and the family spent two years in Alabama. After earning their degrees in art history (Kate) and English (Laura) from the University of California, Berkeley, they returned to Pasadena to live with their parents at the Rodarte family home.

The sisters have frequently been asked to describe this California childhood. Their answer is a list, a direct evocation of place that reads like a modernist poem: tide pools, redwood forests, monarch butterflies, mustard fields, wild blackberries, beekeepers and “The Rainbow Goblins,” an extravagantly illustrated 1970s fairy tale about seven imps who prowl the countryside and devour the colors of the rainbow.

This list has a certain opaqueness, however: a stubborn but polite resistance to the question. California is their place, their source of inspiration and comfort. Since the early 20th century, an impressive range of artists and designers living in the West have felt a greater freedom to experiment precisely because they were outside the hierarchical structures of New York and Europe. “Genius on the Wrong Coast” was the acerbic title of an article that Clive Barnes published about Lester Horton, the innovative choreographer, in 1967. And still, this idea of the wrong coast persists. “I don’t know young New York designers who are working in the way that Rodarte is,” de Betak says. The originality of their vision and their interest in what Laura refers to as “unconventional techniques” all seem to fall outside the mainstream, East or West. To the world of fashion, they are exotic aliens, entirely self-taught regarding the history, skills and materials of costume and couture.

In 2006, Rodarte was a runner-up in the C.F.D.A./Vogue Fashion Fund awards; the prize was $50,000 and a mentorship. The Council of Fashion Designers of America paired Rodarte with James McArthur, then the executive vice president of the Gucci Group and chief executive and president of Balenciaga. A luxury firm like Balenciaga, founded by a designer who had never apprenticed for another couturier, was a good model for Rodarte. “This is what our world was like when we started,” Laura says, waving her arms at the general mayhem of Apex Electronics, a massive teetering heap of Atomic Age relics. At the Rodarte studio, there is just one employee, and a group of interns helps out with the day-to-day responsibilities. The business, however, has grown considerably. “All of our income is generated through the sale of our collections to stores and private clients,” Kate says. Rodarte was in 42 stores worldwide last season and sold about 500 pieces, including accessories. “James was able to talk us through things like organization and how structure works,” Laura says. “He gave us perspectives about the retail side, the logistical side, the bureaucratic side. Even if we can’t implement everything we’ve learned, it’s a way of finding our road to doing things.”

The Mulleavys still talk to McArthur often and recently asked for his advice on an international trademark issue. (Still nascent in the era of the Callot Soeurs, trademarks have taken a legal effort to secure an originator’s rights to what the art historian Nancy Troy so aptly called “a singular charismatic identity” of the couturier.) “You hear these fairy-tale stories about designers who start selling one day and then three years later, they’re making $20 million a year,” Laura adds. “That’s not in our plan. That’s not the kind of clothing we do. We don’t make a product that can be mass-produced.”

To the outside world, it might seem that Rodarte is in fact a fashion fairy tale, a story about paper dolls who wake up one day as supermodels on the cover of Vogue. But to the Mulleavy sisters, standing inside an electronics warehouse and wondering how to find their way out of the puzzle of constructing the next shoe, it’s the life they’ve chosen.

Lately, Kate and Laura have been thinking — in their abstract but highly specific way — about color: Olafur Eliasson’s large-scale installations of radiant mists and mirrors and the stark space-oddity palette of Nicholas Roeg’s “Man Who Fell to Earth.” “We have been obsessed with layering and ways of creating weird dimensionalities,” Laura says, mentally tracing the arc their work has followed since the beginning. “We were using pale shades, so I always thought it was about building texture and illusion.” She pauses and tugs at the raveling threads of a braided copper wire. “And then I realized that what we had been obsessing about from the beginning was the idea of color and how to create it. It took three years to figure that out. But,” she added with pure delight and quiet assurance, “I know I don’t want to give up that chance to keep figuring things out.”

Susan Morgan last wrote for the magazine about the Los Angeles art project “Women in the City.”

nytimes