She is 28, but an old 28. While many of her peers, including those who were showing alongside her recently during New York Fashion Week: Men's, are scrambling, Bode's pace is slower. Five floors above Clinton Street, in her warrenlike studio and apartment, Bode has her stockpiles and her scissors, and operates more like a midcentury dressmaker than many of her fellow designers. Her business, only a year old, is still heavily weighted toward private clients; she has, at the moment, designs in two stores in Japan (including one of the best, United Arrows) and one in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has to keep her reach small, she explained: Her collection is built around antique and deadstock fabrics that she finds, from heirloom family quilts to African country cloths, and they are not infinitely extensible.
"This is an early-1900s quilt," she said, taking one jacket by the sleeve. "This is it. It's just one. People love that. There was not a machine stitch in this quilt before we put it together."
There is not much that Bode won't consider as raw material for her collection: bed linens and vinyl upholstery, quilts and tapestries. For her new collection -- which she presented July 13 -- she road-tripped through the south of France, stopping at flea markets and country houses along the way, with a scavenger's eye to anything and everything that might be alchemized.
"We ripped mattress covers off," she said, pointing to a pair of striped jackets. "They had all the filling in them -- the feathers and everything. It was a nightmare, it went everywhere. But they have this beautiful weight to them." She has become an expert on the art of fabric cleaning and mending, haunting internet forums about enzymes and stain release.
Bode grew up antiquing with her mother and aunts, and she has been using antique fabrics since her days as a student at Parsons. While many of her classmates pushed the envelope of design, she began exploring the simple shapes she still uses: work jackets, boxy shirts and wide-leg pants.
"I had a meltdown moment: I'm the most wearable out of my class," she said. "Every other person was doing these really conceptual, drape-y, crazy, feather boa things. My professors were like, 'No, no, no, you're going to be the one who actually has a company.'"
That company is built on a deeply personal attachment to cloth and to individual items, heirlooms remade into new heirlooms. "I'm making things that people are supposed to have for 50 years or longer," she said.
She has begun using the clothes to tell family stories. Her new collection takes up the life of an 83-year-old great-aunt in the south of France, whom she visited in her country home, staying in the attic, whose long-held memories suffuse the whole. Her first presentation, in February, reimagined a long-gone family home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, sold after a father's death: a memory older than her own, incarnated. (Bode, too, spends summers on the Cape.)
"I have aunts that call me the family archivist," she said. They were startled, seeing her February presentation, to hear her models, mostly friends, ambling easily and lazily through the space with its old furniture, rugs and flowers, calling out their names.
High Profile on 07/23/2017