There’s a word in Portuguese that’s like nostalgia for something that never happened-that’s how I feel about Bode clothes…. “The vividness and articulate force of the vision that’s expressed in all of these clothes, I found so overwhelming and enchanting right away.
Sullivan was so captivated by the experience that when he got married last fall, he ordered a custom Bode dinner jacket for the rehearsal dinner. “Going to Bode for the first time felt like walking into a dream,” Connor Sullivan, a 37-year-old lawyer, told me, of the brand’s store in New York. “When Emily does Cape Cod, she’s channeling an experience that’s so specific and weird, it doesn’t read anything like the Kennedys’ Cape Cod, you know?” explained Aaron on a separate occasion, whose Indian heritage has also opened Emily’s Americana to heady global influences. It’s not a history book so much as a version of a cherished family album that’s been passed down for generations. You can perceive echoes of a romantic old way of living, of shared American mythologies, of Betsy Ross and Gee’s Bend, the crowded prewar Lower East Side and serene summer nights in New England. Thumbing through a rack of Bode clothing brings to mind the sense of curiosity and discovery you might feel when sifting through a grandparent’s attic or a tucked-away antiques shop in an unfamiliar city. It’s so specific that you’d think it would fail to speak to a broad audience.
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Her world, full of family history and records of forgotten artisanship, tends to stir up wistful memories. Everybody who has shopped for designer clothing knows what it’s like to dress up in someone else’s fantasy. But Ralph never actually lived there.Įmily is tapping into something different, something menswear hasn’t seen before. In 1986, Ralph Lauren opened a flagship store in an epic Gilded Age mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side-a maze of warm, Waspy home interiors meant to evoke a country estate, a marvel of aesthetically coherent retail.
Emily and Aaron are taking it one step further. Now, every fashion brand feels the need to articulate the world around its clothing, the alluring marketing context that makes one brand’s white button-down more enticing than another. “Because it does still feel like my apartment.”īefore Ralph Lauren merchandised his entire collection together at Bloomingdale’s in 1970, rather than in separate departments, it was novel for retail stores to sell a designer’s collection together. “Couldn’t I just sleep here?” Emily, 34, says of the old place. But the renovations on the new place aren’t done, and while Aaron visits clothing factories in India, Emily is staying in a hotel.
The hand-operated elevator in the building began to feel impractical with a baby on the way. Hanging alongside are the brand’s famous one-off pieces that reveal fecund seams of bygone craft, in the form of shirts made of hand-mended French linens and coats cut from midcentury plaid blankets.Įmily and Aaron lived in this apartment for nearly five years before opting to move to a quiet block in the West Village. The stores all stock Bode’s rapidly expanding and evolving ready-to-wear collections, which are richly considered explorations of material culture, guided by Emily’s family histories. This is in addition to Bode’s NYC flagship store around the corner and a smaller tailor shop next door The River, a Bode-fied bar Emily and Aaron co-own close by a 3,000-square-foot shop in Los Angeles and several planned retail stores elsewhere in the world. The airy loft is now the latest expansion of the Bode-verse: the brand’s new fine-tailoring studio, where clients can get fitted for suiting and other custom garments. Emily Adams Bode Aujla is sitting on a velvet-cushioned couch in her former apartment, which she and her husband, the interior designer Aaron Aujla, recently vacated. High above Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood, the early spring sun is shining through antique lace curtains.
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