Rodarte Marks 10 Years With an Ethereal Comeback Collection

Ten years ago the Rodarte sisters, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, flew from their native California to New York with a handful of dresses they’d made themselves (without any professional training), and showed them on the first Friday of Fashion Week, in the most unpopular time slot of 9 p.m. The dresses were delicate and subdued and impressed the small audience that got a glimpse of the pieces that fateful night. Season after season afterward, the gowns became more diaphanous and futuristic — clothes you imagined you would wear if you were a mythical warrior goddess from another time. Their shows became these perfect fashion fantasies.

And then reality seemed to hit for a bit, with some of their most recent collections becoming a tug of war between their dreamlike inspirations and the need to make wearable — ugh, that word! — clothes that they could actually sell. And hey! no fault in that, girls gotta make money, but the collections were bittersweet memories of former greatness.

Until today. Perhaps to celebrate their 10th anniversary, Kate and Laura delivered a beautiful collection that seemed to encapsulate all their ethereal fantasies while still being grounded in reality, i.e., marketable clothes. The set featured a futuristic cemetery with flowers sprouting from concrete and earth, surrounded by tubes of neon light that at one point started smoking slightly. The models walked in circles wearing the most decadent leather and lace looks.