Inside the Launch of Bode’s New Womenswear
A few years ago, at the 2021 Met Gala, Lorde appeared on the red carpet in one of the strangest and most miraculous ensembles in Met Gala history. It was a white silk skirt and open front jacket, beaded with delicate metal work and studded with cabochons, and she had little white slippers on her feet and a crown, by the New York jeweler Jean Prounis, on her head. It was sexy, weird, luxurious, and so not what you might expect from Emily Adams Bode Aujla, a woman who’s made her name with darling men’s jackets made of old quilts. Lorde looked not only dressed but adorned. Somehow, too, there was a sense that these clothes, though designed for one of the most publicity-frenzied events in the entertainment and fashion worlds, were really Lorde’s. That they had some history and personal meaning to them; that she had some kind of deep and enchanting connection to the cloth.
Bode Aulja has made a highly influential mark on men’s fashion since she launched, in 2016, her line of jackets and pants cut into simple silhouettes from old quilts and reproductions of antique textiles. But that Met Gala moment hinted that she had a lot to say about womenswear.
A year and a half later, Bode Aujla is making her first fully articulated expression of what her world of women’s clothing might be. Today in Paris, showing on the men’s calendar, she debuted her first full-fledged Bode womenswear collection, a dazzling and gorgeously surprising presentation of evening gowns, formal coats, suiting, and novelty knits. She has made a few pieces for women here and there, particularly for private clients, and of course, women already shop her menswear. But this show marks the beginning of a fully realized women’s universe to complement her men’s.
Bode Aujla said in an interview last week that part of her motive was that her womenswear vision is so distinct from what she’s done with menswear. Most people might assume they know what her women’s clothes might look like, especially since so many women already wear the men’s pieces, but, “I wanted to show people that the womenswear that I would design is not the way that most people would think Bode womenswear would be, unless they were really close to me or they followed me through the design process.”
Many of her menswear collections have focused on the biographical history of her family or loved ones, like her Pre-Fall 2022 collection that drew on her own recent wedding celebrations, or the Fall 2020 show that drew on her husband’s business partner’s education in a former Shaker village. This collection is inspired by Bode Aujla’s mother, who worked after college, in the 1970s, on the estate of an aging doyenne who dressed in her 1920s evening gowns to eat alone at an enormous dinner table.. “She had extreme, idiosyncratic behaviors,” the designer explained of her mother’s employer, and the show is “really about how my mom watching this person kind of defined who she became and what she thought was interesting.”
The standouts in the collection are pulled from that decadent narrative, particularly a slew of heavily beaded recreations of 1920s gowns and dresses, like a sheer sage dress with a bronze bodice and skirt and yellow and teal beads, or a gold seed bead A-line dress with a rounded capelet neck. (Bode has all its beadwork done in India.) The designer told me she hadn’t had any asks yet for an Oscar dress, but one would imagine these would make fantastic awards season looks. There are also sheer beaded tops and handcrotched knits, designed to be worn with embellished trousers, or under a butter yellow windowpane shawl collar suit, or over a bralet made of ribbons and a pair of silk tap shorts. Unlike her men’s, and very much like the ensemble she made for Lorde, the clothes are sexy, in a cerebral, eccentric way. One model wore a see-through sequined skirt with a chunky novelty sweater. That sweater and others were recreations of pieces from her mother’s wardrobe, one with a pointed yoke pattern made by a Norweigian knitter who works with historic knits.
Bode’s clothes are so lovely that the normal fashion show questions, like whether women want to dress up more, or whether they’ll convince themselves they need an opera coat, feel suddenly irrelevant. You see something like a billiard board green evening coat that fastens only at the neck, or a heavy burgundy velvet coat dress, and suddenly begin envisioning what an amazing life you’d live in that piece: of course you need an opera coat! There are fashion designers that respond to the way we live our lives, who want to make clothing that fits into the routine of contemporary life; and then there are fashion designers who suggest a gentler or more elegant way of living, like Grace Wales Bonner, or The Row’s Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, or Bode Aujla.
Looking at the Bode clothes in a FaceTime conversation last week, I was struck by how collectible they all felt. And not in the hot-off-the-runway-grail way we’re so accustomed to in womenswear; more like the aching charge I’ve gotten from finding the perfect 1970s Saint Laurent blazer, or a 1990s Yohji Yamamoto cape, or a Schiaparelli hat. You know, the feeling of a great vintage find, where you’re excited with who might have worn these weird and special clothes before and how you might honor them by giving their old stuff a new life. Bode Aujla’s clothes are new or reproductions, though, which makes me think about what Yves Saint Laurent did in his swoony 1970s prime, recreating clothes from history, whether 19th century Russia or 1940s Paris, with an alluring, passionate opulence. Saint Laurent was a revisionist, who grabbed onto something real but then let his imagination run wild. Bode Aujla is more interested in personal and family history, which is what makes her work so relevant today. Who needs far-flung myths when you have your own family history to preserve and explore?
Bode Aujla once told me she wanted to start Bode to change the culture around the way men dress. She’s certainly done that, as her defiantly trendless pieces have built up a seductive and singular universe of beauty and taste. Her New York store, located on Hester Street and designed by her husband’s firm, Green River Projects, is always buzzing with customers (in fact, this past weekend I saw two women buying men’s pants for themselves), as is the coffee shop they opened next door. That space also serves as a tailor, where clients are encouraged to have their pieces mended. Each garment also comes with a tag that explains the inspiration and story behind the garment. In sum, her clothes seem to exude the treasured weight of history, almost as if her customers are custodians for garments with a story, embedding them with stories of their own. Only the stories within these much more complex (and, in a fantastic way, strange) and women’s clothes are even richer.
Bode’s growth has been explosive, especially over the past two years. With the launch of women’s, she seems well on her way to creating the new blueprint for American luxury.
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