Brand Spotlight: BODE

Nestled away in a Lower East side Manhattan apartment turned studio is a brand that is taking your grandmother's favorite quilts and creating some the most outstanding menswear to come out of NYC in the last decade. Bode’s creative director Emily Bode (pronounced BOH-dee) knew from an early age that she had a lifestyle that she wanted to market to the world. Spending her weekends in antique malls and picking trips with her family, Bode has been curating her take on a sustainable lifestyle since she was six years old. It was this lifelong passion for the fabrics of the past that paved her way in the current fashion industry.

From her childhood bedroom to her studio, you can find antique fabrics, quilts, table linens, anything that is tangible to the senses and antique, meticulously curated into a plaided, quilted world. In a quest to share her aesthetic with the community, her Fall/Winter 2019 show threw the runway out of the window and brought domesticated living situations into the fashion world, with personally curated bedroom, kitchen and living room scenes filled with models donning brightly colored repurposed workwear jackets and crisp flared trousers pieced together from table linens.

Her business model is quite genius too, because she is working with such a small amount of fabric, Bode is able to source small run, quick turnaround local manufacturing. In many cases, they not only sell out of their NYC stockists within the first week, but they are even able to turn around custom pieces and specialities for clients within 24 hours. Not underestimating the power of the consumer, she understands that she does have a need to create higher run pieces and in order to do so she has partnered with a quilt manufacturer in India that is able to recreate and mend damaged quilts.

The idea is simple, scour the attics, barns, and basements throughout the United States and find the most unique and forgotten fabrics. The execution is brilliant and the end product is the perfect case study on vintage modernity.

Check out Bode at some of her stockists around NYC, including Totokaelo, Bergdorf Goodman and Open Ceremony and on their website here.