When Emily Adams Bode Aujla started her brand in 2016, she wanted to change the way that people get dressed. Today, she’s doing just that. Bode has quickly grown into one of America’s most revered fashion labels through their steadfast dedication to creating vintage-inspired garments, often out of repurposed textiles. In the age of fashion brands rushing to keep up with the lightning speed trend cycle, Bode rides its own wave, creating clothing that compounds off of its own design voice each season rather than catering to trends. Bode’s fast rise has led to Bode herself having to forge her own path in the American fashion space, as a woman designing menswear (up until the introduction of womenswear in January), building an independent brand that is rooted in its commitment to ethically made East Coast eclectic garments.
Last Wednesday, Bode and I caught up for an interview after her masterclass at Arnold Hall. See below for the interview:
Nicholson Baird: So I told my mom you’re here and she freaked out.
Emily Bode: Really! Does she like fashion?
Baird: She does! Every time she’s in New York she wants to go to Bode.
Bode: We have a lot of mom fans for sure. But it’s cool because then they actually will buy their kids clothes. It comes down to people that enjoy craft and historical sentiments and things.
Baird: Well, thinking about your store on Hester Street, there is a consistent vibe curation going on. I’m interested as to how interiors are an extension of this tight knit Bode brand that you’ve created.
Bode: Yeah, it’s a huge part of our business. I mean, it’s definitely what makes us who we are, because of my husband and his business partner Ben Bloomstein’s company, Green River Project. He and I both really believe in retail, but even more than that we derive our inspiration from domestic space. From spaces that deal with private versus public in general. So that’s a big part of the business and it’s something that we’ve always talked about. All my shows revolve around the domestic space and lived private spaces. So it’s something that he’s been involved in even with Bode since before he was at Bode. So the Hester Street store is the first permanent culmination of that apart from where we lived.
Baird: Isn’t it Vogue that has the video of your apartment on their Youtube?
Bode: Oh my god, yeah. I can’t watch it.
Baird: Thinking about the domestic space in its relationship to Bode, I know you just presented The Crane Estate collection in Paris. What I noticed a lot with The Crane Estate is that what’s so specific to Bode is that trends don’t really exist in my idea of the brand.
Bode: Thank you for saying that.
Baird: It’s a compounding of your own storytelling, if that makes sense? When you look at huge brands they of course have their core design language, but are relatively navigated by trends. How has it been both business-wise and creatively to just narrow focus on your vision regardless of trends?
Bode: I think mostly because we have not taken outside investors or financing, we’ve been able to do what we want. We don’t have the pressure to launch denim because there’s a really good margin, or it’s a volume business, or invest more in t-shirts. We’ve been able to say, “this season, we actually don’t even want to do t-shirts at all.” We can be a little bit more self-reliant in that way, so we don’t need to be dictated by consumer trends. A couple years ago, when everybody was wearing sweatpants, we didn’t have to engage if we didn’t want to. Obviously, to some extent, we want to because it’s a good business opportunity for certain things. If there’s a category that it seems that everybody is looking for from us, we can listen to our customers on that, but we don’t have to be reliant on trends as a whole.
Baird: It’s really so impressive and just quite nice to see, season after season you’re so specific and doing your own thing. I think Bode kind of speaks to the eccentric, intellectual, East Coast living, intricately crafted, and curious person. Would you say that is kind of the direction that you’ve crafted Bode after?
Bode: Yeah, I’d say that’s our primary consumer. We definitely have capital F fashion consumers also that are buying it on Mr. Porter, Ssense or Matches, and they buy it because they saw it on a celebrity or whatever. They’re not necessarily completely involved with the brand narrative, it doesn’t necessarily speak to them because they might not even know it. It might be that they were looking for a black pair of pants for their wedding, it’s really specific. So that’s a very specific kind of customer. But I think that the main client of ours, he’s quite sentimental. He engages with his own history. He’s largely East Coast, we definitely sell all over the world, but I think most of our customers are in New York. In terms of where Bode is being worn the most, New York is number one and then Brooklyn is number two.
Baird: I feel like it’s become a uniform in a lot of ways. You can definitely see the impact that Bode has had just walking around downtown Manhattan or Brooklyn, you know? Earlier, you were talking about how you want to change the way people dress and I think you totally have. I remember a year or so ago, seeing a designer that was making quilted jackets very similar to your own designs but on a much less sustainable business model. Something that’s paramount to Bode as a brand is the idea of the hand and really focusing on making a garment that will live on to become an heirloom piece. So what is it like for you to watch that very sustainable core idea diffuse itself through the fashion industry?
Bode: In some ways, I think we’ve achieved what we want to achieve because of that, right? You know you’ve done something right when people quote unquote, copy you, but I think it’s more than that. It’s one thing if a big company is doing a one for one sample, that’s kind of a bummer. But when smaller brands are doing it, it’s definitely flattering. And that’s the point, we want people to work with materials that they otherwise wouldn’t. In some cases it comes down to, if somebody’s not just making things from vintage, but if they’re taking your entire brand identity and copying and pasting it, that’s also a bummer. Because the whole point is that I want to inspire people of all ages, but especially young people to forge their own path like I did. So I feel like I’ve failed if people are just trying to copy because it’s like, “oh, gosh, you’re not hearing anything we’re saying!”The point is that you can create a successful business in a million different ways, and you don’t have to copy or follow the rulebook of what the fashion industry used to be. You definitely don’t have to copy, so those kinds of things are a bummer. But I think in general, it’s really exciting to see all these young brands being able to fend for themselves against bigger brands, because they’re using materials that maybe don’t even cost as much as investing in 1000 meters of a jacquard or something.
Baird: I know you take a lot of inspiration from fabrics themselves and from going to flea markets. I’m interested as to how pop culture may influence you? Books, literature, or film?
Bode: I would say in a general worldview, sure. Not necessarily a one to one. Film I think in general is really inspirational to me and to my husband, Aaron. We believe in film, it’s also creating its own world, it’s changing the way that people think. Books obviously do the same thing, but film is so visual. So I’d say that is inspiring but there’s not a particular person in pop culture that I’m constantly referencing. Not in the way that I would constantly reference a textile.
Baird: I know you guys were talking about this at the masterclass, but I’m curious as to your process with using celebrities in your campaigns? Are you looking for VIPs or is it more organic?
Bode: Prominent people, for sure. We did Jeremy O’Harris, who’s a playwright. We’ve done friends of ours, like our friends who are in bands for sure. And then of course, we loan products for a million shoots.
Baird: What’s your general relationship with fashion media?
Bode: You want to be close to who’s writing about the brand because then they really understand it. So I think that’s our general relationship. There’s some people that we know really well and then there’s some people that we only really see at shows, especially if they don’t live in New York.
Baird: Is New York a long term root for you? I know you were talking earlier about how Paris is a super practical location for the brand. Are you steadfast keeping the brand in New York, or are you open to moving around?
Bode: We’re open to moving around. We live between New York and Connecticut, but we lived in LA for a month when we opened the store there, so I wouldn’t doubt that if we’re opening a store in Paris, we’re gonna live there for a month. If we have a store in Tokyo, hopefully we could live there for a little bit, too. I would love to engage with the community in which we open a store because that’s how you meet incredible retail staff. You get to know the neighborhood, the way in which people eat, drink, and shop, or do their laundry. So I think that’s really important, and you only get that when you’re actually living there for longer than a week.
Words by Nicholson Baird.
Graphic by Fai McCurdy.
Special thanks to Dirk Standen.