Kate and Laura Mulleavy looked to the movies for Rodarte’s spring collection. “We were inspired by a kind of a dreamscape which links us between two worlds,” said Kate on a video call. “One was the film Three Women, and the other was Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The designers were thinking of “the dream-like element of losing yourself in your landscape.”
The yellow floral chiffon gown that opened the collection seemed to encapsulate the straddling of earthy and heavenly realms: the print had an underlying feeling of the domestic while the “cloud-like” sleeves quite literally elevated it. “What’s typical in our clothes is that the construction doesn’t require heavy elements; it just exists,” Kate said. Alternate versions of the same dress—with slightly less voluminous sleeves, as a simple slip, more casual as a wrap dress with a lace collar, and even more youthful as an ultra-short wrap-dress in twill—seemed to also hint at alternate realities. Which one’s real? Which one’s true?
From the setting of Three Women they took a cactus theme, which they then asked their mother to illustrate and used as a placement print on simple bias-cut dresses; though a fully-beaded version on a simple tulle chemise that looked as if it had delicately landed on the model’s shoulders was one of the collection’s best pieces. “We were draping it after we’d done all the beading and we both said, ‘I like the way it is,’ so we ended up just shaping the tulle and leaving it,” said Kate. “It’s almost as if the tulle is floating on top of the dress.”
A group of printed lamé jacquard gowns was especially fabulous, exposing “hidden” shapes depending on how they caught the light. But the Mulleavys can even conjure magic with simple materials: a series of 1930s-inspired bias cut slip dresses with diamond-like seam lines were just as elegant and captivating; especially one in peach crinkle chiffon with contrasting delicate powder blue flowers that looked to be almost bioluminescent.
