October 6, 2009
Fashion Diary
Rodarte’s Mulleavy Sisters Find No Limits in L.A.
By Guy Trebay
Paris
Ask some designers what gets them going and they talk about the light in North Africa or Jane Fonda in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” or else flappers or the Marchesa Casati or sunsets painted by Georgia O'keeffe. Ask the sisters who are the American designers behind the Rodarte label and you get an answer right out of Paul Rudnick's script for “Addams Family Values.”
Laura and Kate Mulleavy, two young Californians who were raised in beachside Santa Cruz and along the leafy prosperous streets of Pasadena, find inspiration in Living Dead Dolls.
“We’re, like, totally obsessed with them,” Kate Mulleavy said Sunday as she stood surrounded by shipping boxes and artwork sheathed in bubble wrap in the upstairs gallery of Colette, the concept store on the Rue Saint-Honoré. “There’s, like, a Bloody Mary one and Edgar Allen Poe doll and an Annabel Lee.”
Holding up a package shaped like a coffin and containing an eerie toy with dark rimmed eyes and a just-leeched pallor, Ms. Mulleavy gazed at it admiringly. “We had them all around the studio when we were designing the last collection,” Ms. Mulleavy added. And if you happened to have seen the Rodarte show — the one with the goth shrouds, bondage boots and tribal tattoos — during New York Fashion Week a few weeks ago, you can see what she means.
It was after Fashion Week in New York in February that Sarah Lerfel, the indefatigable owner and buyer for Colette, approached the Mulleavy sisters with the idea of their being curators of a show in the store’s second-floor gallery.
Plenty of artists have exhibited there, in an unpromising but much-coveted space wedged into a bi-level balcony corner of the store right behind menswear. But few in recent memory have colonized the space as effectively as the Rodarte team. You have to concede that the Mulleavy sisters, like them or not, have their own point of view.
“We wanted to approach it as if you were at our studio,” Ms. Mulleavy said, referring to a loft space amid the taco stands and strip joints on Olympic Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, a place whose ambient atmosphere is about as far as can be imagined from the chic haunts of the Right Bank.
They imported books whose covers had been repainted by their friend, the photographer Autumn de Wilde (and her daughter Arrow); Raymond Pettibon paintings; dreamily glitter-ornamented photographs by Karen Kilimnik; Alexandra Grant’s loopy pink neon Love sculpture; and a suite of word paintings by the Sonic Youth singer Kim Gordon that, shown in sequence, read like a raunchy haiku. They brought in a bunch of Rodarte T-shirts and tote bags because T-shirts and tote bags are so central to art installations these days that even the Turner Prize-winning artist Tracey Emin ran up some canvas totes (with a logo of a winged phallus) for the last Venice Biennale.
The Mulleavy sisters also brought with them another must-have accessory for any self- respecting fashion person lately: a documentary film crew. Two producers, a sound technician and a cameraman followed them everywhere in Paris, as they have for the last four years.
On paper, nothing about Rodarte makes much sense in the context of the fashion business as it currently works, and that is what makes them appealing. They are not — or, anyway, were not at the beginning — well connected or from New York or a European fashion capital. They are not particularly comely or media-genic, and they are not blessed with corporate backing or, most important in contemporary fashion, men.
You would think that fashion had little room for two well-educated (University of California, Berkeley), goofy and well-upholstered young women who look more like Riot Grrrls than models. But that, as has been pointed out before, is one of the redeeming aspects of the business: sometimes it is the Ship of Fools and sometimes it’s the ark.
“If we had had to make it in a logical marketing sense, I don’t think we could ever have done it,” said Ms. Mulleavy, whose last collection was greeted with nearly unanimous critical praise. “We were starting from such a small place.”
They were starting from their own lifelong and obsessive interest in clothes and their sense that, insular as Los Angeles can sometimes seem, it does confer a particular aesthetic advantage.
“So much of the L.A. landscape is frontier that you end up living more in your imagination and in an interior world,” said Ms. Mulleavy, as her much shyer sister directed a workman hanging an enormous image made from plastic googly-eyes in the store window.
“People said to us at first that we would have to move to New York,” or Paris, where Rick Owens, another Angeleno, staked a claim and became an enormous success.
“But we took a step back and thought about it,” Ms. Mulleavy added. “We realized that L.A. was a better place for us to be.”
“I know there are supposed to be all these limitations to living in L.A., but we never felt that,” said the designer, as her sister, Laura, appeared at a balcony holding up one of the rag dolls they had sewn by hand and dressed in couture clothes for the Colette exhibition, which opens Monday evening.
“I mean, we grew up right near Mount Wilson, which is the place where they discovered that the universe is infinite,” she said.
. Their creations are just breathtaking. Although I have seen very few people pull them off irl. I'm going to go back and read the articles posted above. I would love to get a peek into their creative minds.
