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ARE RODARTE TOO ARTY?
What’s going on at Rodarte? During the live stream on ShowStudio, Kate and Laura Mulleavy explained in depth the starting points and inspirations for this season’s collection. Unfortunately, they did so in such an incomprehensible way the complex complexities of the sisters’ minds will remain a mystery to most. As will the answer to the inevitable question: how do you put that on the bodies of non-sleepwalking etheral beauties or Hollywood fans like Natalie Portman.
American fashion essentially dreams of modernism, it’s doing great at the casual and wearable/saleable. Not so Rodarte. Which makes them stand out – in a good way and in a bad way. Through their collections, the sisters regularly turn the American dream into a nightmare with David Lynch undertones. References include Japan (SS 08), Land Art (AW 09/10), or Frankenstein (SS10), reflecting the sisters’ backgrounds and interests in art&literature. As a result, you get that spectacular down-to-earth otherwordliness which has become the Rodarte trademark. Standing out is a rare quality in fashion business, especially in the U.S. It’s good to see it’s won Rodarte fans beyond the fashion hardcore, as successful collaborations with Target, Opening Ceremony, or Colette in Paris prove.
And yet, and yet. I’m less convinced of the sister’s more and more tighter interweaving of fashion and art. Rodarte’s astronomic price tags certainly are very art business.
But turn off the day-glo shoe effects, switch on the lights, put the collection out of the Gagosian art gallery, strip it off the lofty meanderings of the Mulleavy mind. Take a good look and compare with past collection. Some fashion critics, like The New York Time’s Cathy Horyn, find it’s less artistically executed than past collections.
Rodarte, I still love you, but please aim for the judgment of the fashion editor, not the art critic’s blessing. Because if you do, you’ll risk ending up just too arty-farty to fashion folks and too kitsch to art people. A nightmare scenario I don’t want those two fashion geniuses ever see exploring.
Quicktake: Rodarte
Exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, NYC, until March 14, 2010
Can’t make it there? Check out the Rodarte dress portraits I took at Swiss Textiles Award 09 and 08:
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