Qué dijeron los que saben:By WWD Staff
If spring was another feather in the caps of Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy — and it was, no question — the plumes would be black. Backstage post-show, Laura said she and her sister were inspired by California condors, the big, bald, black vultures that faced extinction in the late Eighties. “We just kept thinking about how they had to scavenge to survive,” she said. “If they were mangled and tattered, how they would be reborn.” That sounds dark and ugly, yet it yielded exquisite results.
At its core the collection was about construction — the cobwebs, complicated and calculated, that are very much a Rodarte signature, here pushed to gorgeous Gothic extreme. Dresses came in beautiful, body-wrapping tatters of delicate silks and cheese cloth that had been burned, stained and distressed to evoke a post-apocalyptic attitude. Graphic black tribal tattoos that sleeved the models’ arms added to the edge. At the opening, a series of tartan-infused styles that suggested a Scottish warrior queen gave way to leather lattices layered over lace and increasingly intricate nets of beads spliced with tie-dye, cascades of dreadlock-like fringe and patches of black feathers.
As for the palette, an alluring melancholy of tea stains and black were broken up by acid green and deep reds. Still, it was a dark proposition. And though the Mulleavys exposed a different approach to the shadowy and subversive, the presentation itself was filled with repetition, with some looks virtually indistinguishable from the next. Then there’s the fact that the Mulleavys have worked their dark side for some time now. As remarkable as this collection was, it would be nice to see them come back into the light and bring a few more approachable looks with them.
By Laird Borrelli-Persson para Style.com
"It's like they're on psychedelics, the way they describe things." That was Sonic Youth frontwoman and Rodarte fan Kim Gordon speaking about Kate and Laura Mulleavy before their show today. The seemingly demure sisters from Pasadena, California—who studied art history with the influential scholar T.J. Clark, the well-informed Gordon noted—have indeed crafted their own baroque dream world (cue the dry ice that created a poison mist over a runway strewn with black grit). It's an imaginary world that's ferocious rather than precious, not to mention ferociously influential. And with its relentless gothic overtones, it's particularly in tune with the moment.
This collection, which married primitivism to the sisters' ongoing interest in futurism, was one of Rodarte's most fully realized. If the silhouettes were familiar, the awe-inspiring construction of the garments represented the apotheosis of the techniques—in knitwear, printing, draping, and pastiche—that the Mulleavys have been refining season after season. Or, as Laura put it: "We ruined everything." In other words, they aged, painted, burned, shredded, sandpapered, and otherwise destroyed all of the materials—including grungy scraps of plaid, plastic, cheesecloth, wool cobweb, crystals, macramé, leather, and more—until they bore only traces of what they had been originally. (Even their footwear collaborator Nicholas Kirkwood's vertiginous heels are now so extravagantly studded that they barely resemble shoes—as a couple of teetering models discovered to their peril.)
"It's like they're on psychedelics, the way they describe things." That was Sonic Youth frontwoman and Rodarte fan Kim Gordon speaking about Kate and Laura Mulleavy before their show today. The seemingly demure sisters from Pasadena, California—who studied art history with the influential scholar T.J. Clark, the well-informed Gordon noted—have indeed crafted their own baroque dream world (cue the dry ice that created a poison mist over a runway strewn with black grit). It's an imaginary world that's ferocious rather than precious, not to mention ferociously influential. And with its relentless gothic overtones, it's particularly in tune with the moment.
This collection, which married primitivism to the sisters' ongoing interest in futurism, was one of Rodarte's most fully realized. If the silhouettes were familiar, the awe-inspiring construction of the garments represented the apotheosis of the techniques—in knitwear, printing, draping, and pastiche—that the Mulleavys have been refining season after season. Or, as Laura put it: "We ruined everything." In other words, they aged, painted, burned, shredded, sandpapered, and otherwise destroyed all of the materials—including grungy scraps of plaid, plastic, cheesecloth, wool cobweb, crystals, macramé, leather, and more—until they bore only traces of what they had been originally. (Even their footwear collaborator Nicholas Kirkwood's vertiginous heels are now so extravagantly studded that they barely resemble shoes—as a couple of teetering models discovered to their peril.)
The idea that someone could "be scarred and still beautiful" was the collection's leitmotif, and it was about as far from some banal notion of "tribal fashion" as you could get. So where did this hallucination originate? A trip to Death Valley, and a corresponding obsession with singed land (which there is sadly too much of in California lately), sparked the sisters' imagination. That somehow evolved into a tale, part Mad Max, part Tim Burton, of a woman burned alive who is transformed into a California condor (you begin to appreciate Gordon's point). Forced to scavenge for existence in a barren, war-torn landscape, she pieces together her attire from rags that, as Laura Mulleavy pointed out, only serve to expose her wounds. It's not exactly a good-night story—but it's a powerful one, and it was expertly told to a rapt and ever more adoring audience.
Detrás de Freja, la modelo argentina Tatiana CotliarFotos Rob Loud/Getty Images North America
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