“I love the idea of taking something old and finding a use for it again,” says Emily Bode, the New York-based designer behind menswear label Bode, which specialises in unique garments made from vintage textiles. Since its launch in 2016, her eponymous brand has been a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist, was recently shortlisted for the LVMH Prize, and has gained a cult following with the likes of Leon Bridges and Ezra Miller wearing her creations on the red carpet.
An archivist at heart, Bode is fascinated by craft and committed to using historical techniques. “It’s all about preservation,” she tells Vogue. “We work with distressed objects that need to be revitalised and materials that would otherwise be discarded.” Indeed, the fabrics she sources—from flea markets, country houses and estate sales across the US and Europe—have lived many lives before they land on her cutting table: her earliest collections included a floral raincoat made of 1960s vinyl taken from outdoor furniture; shorts fashioned from antique table linens; and jackets constructed from vintage towels. Repaired by hand and overlaid with appliqué, quilting and patchwork, her textiles are imbued with a renewed sense of purpose to produce looks that are thoroughly modern.
Ahead of Earth Day on 22 April, Bode tells Vogue about her sustainable practices and describes six restoration techniques she used in her AW19 menswear collection.
Quilting
Image: Alastair Nicol
“The trousers and shirt jacket in this look are made from a quilt I bought from a dealer who is based in the Midwest. What I loved about it was that the quilt itself had been made from vintage workwear and military garments, and it was unfinished. When stores buy into our items, they tend to want one-of-a-kind pieces, but then for a lot of our accounts everything needs to match for e-commerce purposes. For that, we remake the original piece using historical techniques. As it’s been on order, I’ve been buying all this workwear—jackets, overalls—and using it to recreate this quilt pattern in the same colourways. We try to use the same type of fabric from the same era: for this, it’s a lot of cream, olive-green and blue, washed twills.”
Stitching
Image: Alastair Nicol
“This scarf is made from a crazy quilt from the early 1900s. These types of scarves have been a part of my collections for the last year and a half, and we usually make them from the remnants of old quilts or from the scraps left over after we’ve made a jacket. It’s great because it means we’re able to use all the different pieces left over from the making of our garments, like the most distressed parts of old quilts which we might not have cut into initially. We stitch together the pieces by hand and then add backing to it.”
Appliqué
Image: Alastair Nicol
“There’s a lot of appliqué on this jacket. It has an underwater scene on it complete with seaweed and shells made with felt appliquéd onto wool. The piece is based on a souvenir jacket my mother had from the late 1970s. That was from Mexico and had a farm scene on it, but instead of taking inspiration from that directly I wanted to reinterpret it as a cropped, 1940s-style jacket that referenced my own family heritage. We did a big cut-out of the Mayflower on the back because we’re Mayflower descendants.”
Patchwork
Image: Alastair Nicol
“I’ve been making one-of-a-kind garments from antique textiles since the very beginning, so I always try to include elements of that in each collection. The patchwork trousers in this look are made from a late 1890s log cabin quilt. Those quilts are usually made from strips of wool, velvet and silk, and they have geometric patterns. The outside strips of the quilt symbolise the walls of the home and there’s usually a red patch in the middle which symbolises the fireplace or hearth. People have done iterations of them for a hundred years, but I love the ones from this time period because they’re heavier and warmer. You can see some of those red patches in these trousers.”
Embroidery
Image: Alastair Nicol
“This look incorporates a lot of embroidery. Underneath the shirt, there’s a vintage T-shirt from the 1960s. We buy a lot of these plain white vintage T-shirts, use home machines to repair them and trace the collar, sleeves and hem with red stitching. The shirt on top is hand-embroidered on linen, and it’s inspired by a 1940s winter scene handkerchief I found in Massachusetts. It has horses pulling carriages and sleighs, with children on them wearing hats and mittens. There are also snow-covered pine trees on the cuffs and on the back left shoulder it says ‘Bode’ in cursive.”
Repurposing
Image: Alastair Nicol
“This look is made from 1920s striped French mattress fabrics that I buy from the south of France and Paris. Sometimes I get them from flea markets, but I also have relationships with local dealers who are able to ship me the goods throughout the year. In the past, I’ve bought whole mattresses and taken them apart. Sometimes they have big stains and watermarks, but I think the wear of the fabric is what makes it beautiful: like the rust marks it gets from sitting in attics. The fabric has a rich history, too, because people would darn them so much. If you look closely you can see these wonderful circular and square darning techniques with heavy threads. We saw that and replicated it in places that the fabric needed to be mended and fixed.”
Also read:
Louis Vuitton’s colouring pencils bring luxury to everyday stationery
Watch the Louis Vuitton autumn/winter 2019 show live here
The Louis Vuitton store in the capital is about to get bigger
The post Earth Day 2019: 6 ways to mend and repurpose vintage clothes appeared first on VOGUE India.
from Fashion – VOGUE India http://bit.ly/2Vkbm6F
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