PAST PERFECT
Emily Adams Bode inspects the past and in it has found a better way to approach clothing for the present. By Alice Birrell.
Emily Adams Bode inspects the past to find a better way to approach clothing for the present.
UP TWO FLIGHTS of metal stairs in New
York’s Chinatown, away from the fug of a drizzly, oppressively humid day, a small air-conditioner rattles away to cool the Bode studio. A team of around six – people are coming and going, having impromptu meetings, and some are obscured by fabric, so taking a head count is difficult – is seated around a white table. Emily Adams Bode pops her head out from behind a rack of clothes to request a moment to finish a discussion about clothing tags.
It is a small detail, but at Bode (pronounced BOH-dee) it is important. Swing tags on the clothing, along with blurbs printed on the website, provide a story, telling the wearer about the history of the piece’s fabric, like an artwork exhibition label. “This workwear jacket is made from an early 1900s wool log cabin quilt,” reads one. “Log cabin quilts became popular in the 1860s to 1950s and are known for their red centers that symbolize hearth or fire. Half of log cabin quilts are dark and the other half light, to symbolize light coming in through the window.”
Now in its fourth year, her label, which in February claimed the inaugural Karl Lagerfeld Award for Innovation at the International Woolmark Prize, established itself as an outlier in an industry of forward-facing excess. Her men’s clothing collections have generated buzz with their use of upcycled antique and deadstock fabrics that she employs alongside reproductions of original finds. The overall effect looks something like the past, but rooted to no single era, and while her label is menswear, yes, she has female fans. In fact, her first ever customer was a woman. “Gosh, it was a lawyer,” the 30-year-old Bode is recounting, tapping her toe on a cardboard box. “This woman, she must have just read the Times that morning and bought a shirt and came and picked it up.” She’s referring to a New York Times article that introduced her as a designer breathing new life into old fabrics. The lawyer was followed by a CEO of a big men’s design company who bought a patchwork jacket, then came a flurry of online orders.
Unlike some designers of fledgling labels when they are suddenly being talked about, she was prepared, which has carried her through three successful years that have included winning the CFDA Award for Emerging Designer last year. “I had heard from a mentor
who said: ‘Make sure you have something sellable the moment you have any press,’” she recalls. “So we took pictures and uploaded them up to our e-comm. The night before my showroom opened, we rented a space on Walker Street.”
Although the room we’re in is a charming jumble of quilts and fabric shelves that reach the ceiling, things follow a vague order: lopsided piles keeling sideways are grouped by fabric. The team have started early to finish sampling of spring/summer ’20, the first collection presented in Paris, where they will now show.
This planned precision sits at odds with the warmth of her pieces. There is a pleasingly haphazard feel to each piece. Her touchpoints meander through centuries, deploying techniques like Edwardian redwork on chalk-white shirts and 1930s piping inspired by an old smoking jacket. “I make clothing more like object items, so there’s more intent put into the unique items than the whole look together,” she says.
The team trawls antique markets for fabrics that fit its criteria and sources deadstock shirting and knits from Italy, French and English linens, and also fabric from Japan, China and India. “A lot of it is provenance,” she explains. “If something has a particular narrative that goes along with it – maybe where it came from, the person’s name, a signature, a date, maybe a note attached – they’re the most wonderful finds.”
But old fabrics present their challenges. “A lot of antique textiles rot, and fall apart and need help.” They treat everything, wash it, and mend it by hand if necessary, deciding whether it needs patching or is a needleand-thread job. They also assess whether it could actually take decades more wear on the body.
Bode’s task is to dredge the stories from the fibres. She searches for what can be resurrected and honoured, like the purpose often attached to men’s dressing. “The particularities of menswear I found inspiring,” she recalls. “My dad doesn’t believe in wearing denim, and my grandfather only wore bow ties … It’s about the intent with which people dress and the boundaries they set themselves.”
As a child growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, she would go to antique markets with her grandmother and mother and wore vintage clothes to high school. “When I was moving my parents out of their house, I found a notebook [of mine] and I had sketches of dresses and sashes, so I was always interested in it.” This led to a dual degree: a bachelor of fine arts at Parsons and philosophy at Eugene Lang. Stints at Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs followed before she launched in 2016.
As fashion in the main obsesses over the next and the new, her attitude is anachronistic. “I’ve always been inspired by the past – I think it’s very grounding on a personal level. Coming from the South, it was really important to educate everyone about the past, so it was ingrained in us from childhood.”
The preoccupation on the runways of late with craft and the handmade came after Bode began her label. “It’s so much part of my
DNA, but for other companies it’s this idea of marketing towards a different audience, or maybe what’s in trend. I think we stand apart in a way: it’s not something that we’re newly invested in.”
Her most recent collections have explored deep familial ties. As a descendent of the founder of the Bode Wagon Company, which made wagons for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses, she sewed horse ribbons together to make pants in harlequin colours to join big-top-bright patchwork tops. Her latest project, a retail store in New York’s Lower East Side, was a collaboration with furniture studio Green River Project, of which her partner, Aaron Aujla, is a co-founder.
Despite this growth, Bode still makes bespoke pieces, and will continue to, including for the betrothed, her favourite clients. “They’re [wanting] garments for a very specific emotional time in their life that is to be preserved forever in photos, so that’s always a really wonderful one.”
All the care, the labour-intensive sourcing process, the handcrafts are a slower, harder way to work, but Bode doesn’t mind. “It’s more difficult, but it has a much stronger emotional response from our consumer, so in the end I think it’s worth it.”