Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy Are Back at Fashion Week, With a “Very New York” Collection
Tomorrow sees the return of Rodarte to the New York runways after a two-year absence from fashion week. As ever, the Kate and Laura Mulleavy are keeping mum about the actual contents of their Spring 2019 collection—theirs is a brand that trades in showtime astonishment—except to say that “it feels very New York to them, very pure and beautiful,” and that the inspiration for the offering is... Rodarte. “It took us 12 years to have a vocabulary to say what we feel; that’s just what it takes,” says Laura.
What might that mean in less opaque terms? A combination of femininity and fierceness that always redraws the boundaries of beauty, on the one hand, and a kind of glowering darkness on the other; clothing that is equal parts ravishing and unnerving. Can extreme prettiness be shocking? At a Rodarte show, hell yes. Consider their Paris debut during the haute couture week two Julys ago where they transformed baby’s breath and dotted swiss from workaday to wondrous. Or remember their digital look book for Fall 2018, shot by pal Autumn de Wilde, which went viral as Kirsten Dunst’s earthy yet ethereal maternity announcement. For further evidence of the confidence and clarity of their vision, one should very soon hightail it to the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington DC, where a major retrospective of the Mulleavys’ designs opens to the public on November 9th.
Feminism in the arts has been on their minds for some time—“we are women, we are creative, we are special,” says Laura—and in some ways it factored in the sisters’ decision to show in Paris in July 2017. “For years in New York we felt so supported by so many people, but at the same time also not supported for our creativity by a certain group of people. We thought people should recognize that we are women running a business,” says Laura. “Alex [the show producer Alexandre de Betak] saw the frustration in us, but he also saw that we could work through it and feel free. And it worked. Paris let us feel very free.”
Now it feels right to be back in New York—not in Paris, not online. “When I see fashion shows through a social media stream,” says Laura, “I don’t feel that I need to really pay attention. The world of fashion needs to change. I have realized that to do a show means creating live theater and allowing an audience to feel it has access to something really special.” This weekend the curtain rises again.
