East Broadway, in New York City’s Chinatown, was scorching. Pastries and wedding cakes lilted in the windows; deliverers dripped sweat down basement steps; pedestrians shielded themselves with dampened arms against the sun. But indoors, away from the simmer (and the day before her Spring presentation), stood a cool and calm Emily Bode in her month-old studio. Her label turns two this August. Yet, in the short window since its launch, she has become internationally admired for her unique, thoroughly researched manifestations of what vintage textiles might become when given second lives. In her new space, where raw, geographically categorized fabrics flank one side and completed garments fill the other, there isn’t a sense of antique-store simplicity or nostalgia so much as there’s one of an enthralling respite—a trip down memory lane surrounded by the energized lushness and distance of stories that once were. She has this capability of sewing together engrams of history but in a nonbinding way; somewhere between the physicality of the cloth she tracks down and the few if not hundreds if not thousands of voices that once surrounded it. This workshop is where Bode’s brain is up for full inspection, and it’s heartening to see her approach to menswear in this nexus; few others make the old new again like she can.
“Spring,” she said, “is a continuation of personal narratives. It’s inspired by my relationship to my longtime collaborator, the artist Aaron Aujla, who is the co-owner of Green River Project.” (Green River Project, a New York–based design studio, collaborated with Bode on the one-off furniture examples presented today alongside the clothing—these items included an exceptionally attractive bench, inspired by railcar seating from the filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s 1966 feature Nayak, for which Bode found the upholstery fabric while sourcing textiles in Wyoming.)
Bode’s source-points are often close to the heart: her family, those she admires, all people. Aujla’s story is that his grandfather traveled to Canada in the 1920s on a forged passport, before India gained independence from British colonized rule in 1947. Part of that freedom came from a cottage industry—promoted by Gandhi—of Indians producing khadi, a handwoven cloth, at home and in their villages. Khadi “created employment, a stronger economy, and self-reliance,” said Bode, noting that, beforehand, the British were buying Indian yarns, making clothes in England, then selling them back to India. The end result for this collection, she added, subsequently infuses Anglo-Canadian (Aujla’s family remained settled in Canada) into majority Indian influences, ranging from, say, lightweight khadi bowling shirts to a suit—nodding to the English—done in toweling material and lined in blue-green stripes against textured white. Also in Bode’s story: rugby shorts and shirts; waffle-knit short-sleeve shirts; Bengalese embroideries; pants that repurpose the cloth and graphics once produced by government-subsidized mills in India; and souvenir T-shirts featuring the Indian flag. Tying it all together: the 24-spoke wheel at the center of that banner symbolizes Gandhi’s call for Indians to become more self-sufficient by looming and crafting their own clothing. Nothing, then, is askew in Bode’s architecture.
She’s demonstrated her immense skill—here as much as ever—but there is one ongoing question that fans and followers continue to ask: What is her balance between one-of-a-kind and reproducible goods? As Bode grows, she is figuring it out, and has found a navigable rhythm for the moment. “We’re still largely focused on vintage textiles,” she says, “and then we work to find something that is reproducible from them. We have mills and producers in India, actually. And, when buyers come, they shop on the rack, and say, ‘How close can you get to this piece?’ Some want each piece exactly the same, and others want only one of a kind. We’re calibrating it, but it’s working.” And that, it feels, is starting to be the foundations of her business’s story—all of which we will continue to watch with fascination as Bode moves past the two-year mark.
