Double Vision - NYT Magazine article on Rodarte's Mulleavy sisters

[DosViolines]

Part 1/2

Double Vision

By SUSAN MORGAN
Published: September 5, 2008

On a California summer afternoon, the industrial landscape of Sun Valley — a stretch of gravel pits and salvage yards next to the Golden State Freeway — seems to quiver against a backdrop of cloudless sky and the Verdugo Mountains on the smudged horizon. Here, deep within the Apex Electronics store, Laura and Kate Mulleavy are carefully excavating a hoard of insulated wires. “The Teflon-coated ones have the most intense colors,” Kate says as she uncoils several inches of blazing vermilion wire, a remnant from a local aerospace firm. Kate, 29, and Laura, 28, are sisters, artistic collaborators and partners in Rodarte, the three-year-old fashion label based in Los Angeles.

Rodarte (pronounced ro-DAR-tay) is a small, extraordinary gem of an enterprise. In 2005, to introduce themselves to the fashion world, the Mulleavy sisters sent out 30 handmade paper dolls, each with a paper armoire containing seven paper dresses. “I was inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald’s paper dolls,” explains Kate, who, like Fitzgerald, drew extensively accessorized wardrobes. The collection itself consisted of 10 meticulously hand-finished garments, including a pumpkin-colored silk cocktail dress with a lovely slouching silhouette and a black wool coat, cut in military style and ingeniously detailed with pheasant feathers and organza inserts. Pieces like these are as skillfully constructed as haute couture (a single gown can require 100 hours of work) but much of it is presented as ready to wear. That first season, their clothes were modestly priced from $2,000 to $3,000. Less than a year later, a whispery yellow silk chiffon evening dress — a pale undulating cascade of tiny pleats and voluptuous, handcrafted rosettes, from the fall/winter collection — was reported to have sold for nearly $20,000. It is now in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute.

The phenomenon of fashion-designing sisters is not new, but it’s extremely rare. During the early 20th century in Paris, the Callot Soeurs were known for their elaborate, diaphanous gowns — weightless dreams of dresses with gauzy layers shot through with metallic threads and faceted crystals that played with the light. Now, in the early 21st century in Los Angeles, it is the Mulleavy sisters who are spinning light, movement and color into astonishing clothes. In a recent fashion spread, the model Coco Rocha is photographed wearing Rodarte; she appears as a jubilant pink fairy, her dress a tattered rainbow shadowed with soft tufts of mohair fog.

The Mulleavy sisters — with their pale complexions and dark gleaming hair — are striking, unselfconscious beauties. These are faces reminiscent of Courbet’s “Jo, La Belle Irlandaise” or those genteel friends photographed by Lady Clementina Hawarden in the mid-19th century. Rodarte is their mother’s maiden name. Their maternal grandfather, an inventor and self-taught aeronautical engineer, left Zacatecas after the Mexican Revolution and traveled to Los Angeles by stagecoach. (In Pasadena, where Kate and Laura still live with their parents, one of their favorite restaurants is housed in a 1909 craftsman bungalow — the very place their grandfather once worked as a roving musician.) Although an anachronistic aura does seem to hover around the Mulleavy sisters, there’s actually very little about them that’s old-fashioned; even their good manners aren’t quaint. They eschew “frocks,” including those they make, and dress practically like studio artists in gray T-shirts (“Hanes three-pack from Target”) and New Balance sneakers. “We are not Chanel,” Kate says. “We don’t have millionaire boyfriends and yachts.”

The start-up money for this altogether sui generis business venture came from the sisters themselves: Kate sold her record collection, 15 cartons crammed with a dizzying amount of carefully selected music ranging from a deluxe, illustrated version of Walt Disney’s Snow White to a mint vinyl first pressing of an early Black Sabbath album; and Laura worked as a waitress until a little over a year ago.

The Rodarte way of thinking is wonderfully unconstricted by eras or trends. The Mulleavy sisters are gifted and indefatigable cultural hunter-gatherers; their exquisite clothing, fearlessly imagined and precisely constructed, attests to their voracious curiosity and constant discernment. They might be thinking about Rolling Thunder’s Memorial Day Weekend Motorcycle Rally, when 400,000 U.S. military veterans and their friends roar onto the National Mall; or they might be looking at the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” Frances Lee Glessner’s miniature forensic crime scenes from the 1940s. Or, you could come across them pondering the fate of the soon-to-be-discontinued “eosin pink,” a color derived from fluorescent red dye named for Eos, the goddess of dawn and commonly used in laboratory procedures. The wires they’re holding now are going to be used as part of the shoes for their new collection. “But first, we needed to figure out whether they could be sewn or soldered,” Laura explains. She strips back the extruded wire’s polymer coating and reveals its lustrous silver core. “Amazing,” she says.

The Rodarte spring ’09 collection will be presented Tuesday at the Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street in Chelsea. “We’d been thinking about an idea of the future and what gets left behind,” Laura says, citing a free-range list of inspirations: earth art of the 1960s and ’70s and Robert Smithson’s displaced mirrors reflecting and fracturing the natural world; Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” four industrial concrete tubes punctured with holes in the patterns of constellations, in a remote Utah field; and the 2001 cult film “Donnie Darko.”

nytimes

 

[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

 

[DosViolines]

Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte at the Apex Electronics store in Sun Valley, Calif. The colorful wires they find there will be incorporated into the shoes for their spring 2009 collection.
Photo: Tierney Gearon for The New York Times

The fall 2008 collection featured the ethereal dresses and cobwebby knits that have become something of a Rodarte trademark.
Photo: Autumn de Wilde

The rock ’n’ roll photographer Autumn de Wilde, who took these behind-the-scenes photos, has documented the Mulleavy’s shows for six seasons and has also become a vital part of their creative universe.
Photo: Autumn de Wilde

A Rodarte dress can be as wispy as a cloud, but the accessories definitely have teeth — a not-so-delicate reminder that Kate and Laura Mulleavy are not living in a fashion fairy tale.
Photo: Tierney Gearon for The New York Times

nytimes

 

[MissMagAddict]

Beautiful Thank you for posting DosViolines

 

[Scott]

amazing article......equally stunning images! i adore their influences....many of the same things that are in my world.

you know,i don't care how big or hyped they are....frankly at this juncture,they absolutely deserve all the glory. they are the best thing in american fashion right now. their vision is unlike anybody we've ever come across here....so what they do for me is immensely appreciated.

btw,if you anyone hasn't seen,i'd also like to point out the latest issue of i-D with that model jourdan on the cover. wonderful article and spread on rodarte with uber-cool kim gordon modelling.

thanks for posting,darling DV

 

[spiceboy]

the sisters are amazing! thanks for this

 

[Spike413]

^ I think you hit the nail on the head, Scott. They're among very few, perhaps even the only, young up and coming designers who really deserve every ounce of hype and excitement that's been surrounding them.

The pale yellow micro-pleated dress that the article mentions is breathtaking in person.

Their stuff is so delicate and dreamy, but there's something lurking beneath the surface of all that prettiness. That duality really came out in their last collection for this fall, and it definitely manifests itself in their murderous shoe creations. Delicacy and danger in the same body.

I can't wait to see what they've done for spring.

 

[wheneveriwakeup]

These photos are so gorgeous & well-done...
Love all the details...
Great article, too...
They are really the only exciting thing about NY fashion week...
Always itching to see what they'll do next...
Can't wait to see what becomes of all those fantastic wires...

Spike, I agree..
They manage to mix dreamy w/ brawn...
Fairy-tales w/ reality...
Erin Fetherson could learn a lot from these two, I think...

 

[kimair]

thanks so much for this article dos...
i have to admit, i was a bit skeptical of them when they first came on the scene...
i mean, we all know the hype surrounding some other "next big things," look at zac posen...
but then i had the opportunity to go to a trunkshow at the neiman marcus here and see the pieces up close and they are absolutely exquisite and both sisters talk about what they do with such passion...
i also got to chat with kate briefly and what i love more than anything else is how unaffected she was...to her (and i suspect her sister), it's really all about making the clothes they want to make and doing it their way...
and even if articles weren't written about then and their show wasn't a must-see, they would still be doing the exact same thing...

 

[Scott]

^exactly! i mean its all still very genuine and very personal for them. when so many would get sucked into all of this and allow it to take over the soul of the work for fame and fortune,they have remained very much the same aesthetically uncompromising rodarte they were when they began. and they've got even stronger.

 

[educo]

thank you so much for this. I had the opportunity to work a rodarte show for f/w 07 and it was an amazing experience to be able to see these creations close up. I think a big factor in their success besides obvious talent and imagination is the fact that they refuse to live in NYC or Europe. The location where they work contributes greatly to their success. It has protected them from the tornado that is fashion in NYC and has kept their work extremely refined and pure, not influenced by the conveyor belt that is NYC fashion.

I am looking forward to seeing their show.

 

[eternitygoddess]

I adore their designs. The sisters still retain the creativity and curiosity that ought to define every designer.

Sometimes I think established designers like Galliano and Lagerfeld are too accustomed to working with the best of materials and a whole entourage of people that their creativity is limited and they aren't able to expand their horizons and their work is often too jaded.

 

[savvysearch]

With these up close images, you get a real sense of how talented these sisters are. These pieces are so beautiful and unique and so pure. there's a surreal dream-like quality to it. But not unique for the sake of uniqueness. There's clearly a very personal style and perspective. I don't get the sense that they are just toying around, but are actually going for something very specific, if only known to them.