Rodarte

Fashion is mostly an endless repetition of something you already have seen before. Season after season trends are recycled to awaken a new desire within the consumer, making fashion the ultimate post-modern expression. But every now and then someone tries to escape this endless cycle of repetitiveness. Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte have tried to do so ever since they presented their first collection in the spring of 2005 in New York. In their parent’s garden house in Pasadena, California, the self-taught Mulleavy sisters first started creating dresses for their Barbie dolls, and even though Rodarte is now one of the most anticipated shows of the New York fashion week, Kate and Laura Mulleavy never really escaped that doll-like dream world. Their intricately and obsessively handcrafted designs show an otherworldly desire. Even though the Rodarte girl – she is always a girl, never a woman - is more than equipped to deal with reality in her spiked and studded heels, her camouflage body art and her tribal dresses, she above all projects a childlike naivety. A naivety that is corrupted and innocent at once, whether it is the Japanese horror goth from their Fall/Winter 2008 collection, the post apocalyptic warrior negotiating between culture and nature from their Spring/Summer 2010 collection or the ethereal Mexican sleepwalkers from the troubled border town of Ciudad Juárez represented in their Fall/Winter 2010 collection.

Image: Daria Werbowy in Rodarte SS10 photographed by David Sims and styled by Grace Coddington for Vogue US March 2010