“The collection is called Dear Homer,” said Emily Bode, the quiet force behind the year-and-a-half-old label Bode, at her Fall presentation this morning. “Homer is a Harvard-educated botanist turned quilt dealer, and he’s more into the study of humans and plants. Ethnobotany. That’s why you see this greenhouse and some of the particular colors in the clothes. He has this vast knowledge . . . for example, I have mint green and Nile green, which were house paints that came to popularity in the 1930s, after the Great Depression.”
To her followers, it is Bode’s known m.o. to plunge into the myriad world of textiles, often producing singular one-time pieces. As her label gains traction, she’s showing zero signs of losing her subtle, striking momentum. Fall was, to that effect, excellent: Vintage striped flannels were cut into shirts or full-bodied trousers, silken bows were fashioned as pseudo-cravats, beading on shirt or jacket edges demonstrated a knowing naïf aesthetic, and loosely topstitched quilting found its way onto a beautiful, almost museum-quality coat. A tiny detail of micro-needlepoint flowering, from a handkerchief, was sewn into the placket of a button-down shirt. “There’s kind of an Ivy schoolboy look, but with an even younger childhood element,” said the designer. “The bows, even the bowed opera shoes, the knee-high socks.” It feels like every last t is crossed and i is dotted when it comes to Bode and her research and her commitment to her chosen space (each season, a “room” is her general leitmotif—today it was, naturally, the greenhouse, built by Green River Project, LLC). And she continues to impress with her analog fortitude; the company is working on an archive system that will detail the provenance of each piece of clothing, and where its textile(s) came from.
But that brought about the big question: What can go into production, and what remains in one-off territory? She is still able to find deadstock batches with enough quantity to create yardage, for, say, shirting runs, and she and her team are now replicating more fabrics, to provide more stock to their wholesale accounts. Still, though, she said, “I’ll never not do the one-of-a-kind stuff.”
