Making History

Creating inspired new pieces with fabrics from fashion’s past seems to be in Emily Adams Bode Aujla’s genes. Robert Sullivan takes us inside the long-awaited debut of her new women’s line.

- Robert Sullivan

Though Emily Adams Bode Aujla, founder of Bode, has now designed her very first line of clothing for women, it’s not the first time she has designed women’s clothes. Students of Bode’s short but wildly successful history will note that while at school—simultaneously studying fashion at Parsons School of Design and philosophy at Eugene Lang College—Emily and her roommate routinely crafted their own clothes for the weekend ahead. “On Fridays, we would stay up late and make a skirt out of crushed velvet or something,” Emily remembers. Making women’s clothes, it seems, wasn’t so much a challenge as a natural occurrence. “It just came so naturally to me that I wasn’t as inspired by it.”

Other factors steered her early direction too: At Parsons, after one design assignment (“Astronauts, maybe?”), a professor suggested she had a knack for menswear. And then there was the prevailing teaching on fashion at the time (and especially women’s fashion), which could emphasize design over material. Emily, however, was fascinated by fabrics and cloth, particularly by textiles that were less inventive than historically pragmatic—textiles that had been worn by people, or many people. “I was more obsessed,” she says, “with something that was steeped in history and came from somebody’s closet.”