From the Cut:
This Is the
Future
of American
Fashion
Can’t you tell?
By Emilia Petrarca
14 new york | july 8–21, 2019
intelligencer
in her chinatown studio in
June, Emily Adams Bode was recover-
ing. It had been a busy few weeks for
the designer. The night before, she’d
thrown herself a 30th-birthday party,
which ended with a midnight marriage
proposal from her boyfriend. Ten days
earlier, she’d won Emerging Designer
of the Year at the CFDA Fashion
Awards, having also been named a fi-
nalist for the LVMH Prize for young
fashion designers in March. Now she
was on to the next major life event: the
debut runway show of her eponymous
line, set to take place during Paris Fash-
ion Week Men’s in just four days. The
only thing standing in her way was a
red-eye flight and the mountains of
clothes, fabric, and sewing tools she
had to cram into as few suitcases as
possible. Her new collection was in-
spired by her family connection to the
Bode Wagon Company, which trans-
ported the Ringling Bros. and Barnum
& Bailey Circus. It includes shirts
hand-painted with the names of every
man in the Bode family, a striped pat-
tern originally found on a 1920s win-
dow curtain, pants made of horse-rid-
ing and county-fair prize ribbons, and
suits fashioned from feed sacks and
tobacco silks. “It’s always chaos,” Bode
said of her world, which resembles a
grandparent’s attic: both crowded and
quiet. The show would receive strong
reviews—“Certainly original if not
flawless,” wrote Vogue—but first she
had to pack. ■