Rodarte’s Laura and Kate Mulleavy Talk Gender in Fashion, Floral Infatuations, and Their Dream Beauty Project
Rodarte's Laura and Kate Mulleavy on Their Floral Infatuation and the Ultimate Fantasy Beauty Project
Museum shows, set into motion many months in advance, sometimes uncannily arrive at just the right moment—when underlying themes and aesthetic currents take on a new resonance. That seems to be the case with “Rodarte,” the first-ever fashion exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. A week after the midterms swept an unprecedented number of female lawmakers into Congress, who doesn’t want to celebrate two of fashion’s most independent minds? The self-taught designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy, who launched their label 13 years ago, hold fast to a deeply personal vision, creating clothing—singed sequins, gold-flecked tulle—seemingly out of a fever dream.
At the same time, back on earth, Rodarte is rooted in the sisters’ home state. The California condor, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, and Death Valley have all served as inspirations; the flowers festooning models’ hair for the Spring 2019 show could have come straight from a Rose Bowl float. But with images of neon-orange smoke and ashen canyons keeping all eyes riveted to the news, it’s powerful to have the work of fashion’s West Coast emissaries installed in the capital. Sublime beauty with a ribbon of darkness is every bit Rodarte. It’s there in the exhibition’s side-by-side display of alter-ego tutus worn by Natalie Portman in Black Swan. It’s on the runway, too, as in this Spring 2018 funereal Victoriana dress topped with a halo of fresh baby's breath.
For two women who grew up playing with paper dolls, not scrunchies and lip gloss, showstopping beauty looks have nonetheless become a Rodarte signature. One season brought punk eyebrows faux-pierced with a dozen rings; another saw rhinestones stand in for eyeliner. That profusion of baby’s breath alone seemed to usher in a vogue for overlooked ’80s-era flowers. “I wouldn’t ever want to take any credit, but if I can see baby’s breath being sold in my local grocery store in Pasadena, you know it went somewhere,” Laura says with a laugh. The Mulleavys are quick, however, to give credit to their longtime collaborators. The makeup artist James Kaliardos, cofounder of Visionaire, has a way of translating references into pigments, like the recent geometric eye shadow that rhymed with exaggerated shoulders. Florist Joseph Free and hairstylist Odile Gilbert, meanwhile, lent their backstage prowess to the NMWA exhibition, outfitting the mannequins in custom wigs (plus clouds of Tresemmé hair spray and dry shampoo) along with bundles of silk flowers.
Here, Laura and Kate open up about gender, the feat of avoiding the flower-crown cliché, and a dream product extension: perfume. One can only hope.
Your work has been exhibited in museums before. What for you was particularly special about this show?
Laura: It’s interesting. Today, when we were leaving the museum, I noticed that they have a kind of welcome statement. I felt very emotional reading it this morning, so I’ll just read [parts of] it to you: “Women artists have been marginalized for centuries. Social conventions limited their training, the subjects they could portray, and the way they could market art to patrons. Gender bias is less overt today, but contemporary women artists still face obstacles and disparities.” It’s something that Kate and I have said for years as women designers—that we felt marginalized within our own industry. It’s a strange experience to realize that the language used to describe what you make is different than your male contemporaries.
Kate: I can’t tell you the countless times I’ve read, “Oh, they’re so crafty.” I have nothing against the word, but it does have a connotation, knowing the context for women and artistic practice and what they were and were not allowed to make. When you use the word couture, it has this sense of authority.
Thinking of the museum’s name, Women in the Arts, who have been your beauty muses over the years? I remember seeing a pregnant Kirsten Dunst looking radiant in your fall lookbook.
Laura: Kirsten was the first celebrity to wear Rodarte. I specifically remember her, 10 or 12 years ago, and then I think about what she’s like now and the kind of sisterhood we have with her. Kirsten was in the film that Kate and I wrote and directed, called Woodshock; there are many dresses that Kirsten has worn that made her feel like we were meant to be storytellers. And there’s a dress that Natalie Portman wore from our Fall 2008 collection, which is in the exhibit, that made her think of us for Black Swan, and made her suggest us to dare it.
Kate: That film deals a lot with the duality of performance and real life, and brutality versus extreme beauty. All those things are things that Laura and I are very interested in.
Speaking of extremes, how did you come to embrace the full-on floral hairstyles of recent seasons—all while avoiding the flower-crown trope?
Laura: I know! I don’t know how we’ve managed that. It was our Fall 2016 collection, and we were prepping for the runway show, and Kate said to me, “I really want to make these flower earrings.” That’s when we called Joseph [Free], who’s such an artist with flowers. We went back and forth and created different styles using lilies and orchids, and it just felt very us. [For this exhibition] we knew that we would want to transform the mannequins, so Odile Gilbert worked on some really amazing styles—she is a magician—and Joseph came to help as well. It was fun to go back to certain collections, for example, our Van Gogh collection, and put sunflowers in the hair, or irises.
Kate: And we re-created our baby’s breath outfits from Paris. You can really get an idea of what the actual runway look was.
Where does your interest in the botanical world come from?
Laura: We grew up in a redwood forest that was right on the edge of the area where we lived. It’s called Aptos, outside of Santa Cruz. We were always around flowers. Our father is a botanist—specifically a mycologist—so we were never not outside. It just has provided endless inspiration. Some of the redwoods are taller than the Statue of Liberty, and there is a sense of self that you get when you stand among them. We’ve always believed in the natural landscape as being the greatest gift we have on the planet, and to see it preserved is really important. If people were able to leave their phones behind for a little bit of time and go appreciate the things that are larger than themselves, it would be really beneficial, just for the purity of one’s mind.
All this talk of trees and flowers—as well as the smell of rain during your spring show—makes me think about perfume. Have you thought about making one?
Laura: If there is anything that Rodarte should do, it should be to make perfume. I would love to make a perfume. When I look at our clothes, I think they feel like flowers half the time, so it would be amazing to do that. I like more flowery scents, but I think Kate likes musky ones. Scent feels so different on different people.
Kate: It will also be interesting once we make a perfume because when we design or collaborate, there’s something from each of us. Sometimes people say, “Do you always end up having the same viewpoint?” And the truth is, we really do. We end up having a very focused, singular viewpoint, but we each bring different things to it.
