The Making of Emily Bode, America’s Next Great Fashion Designer

By Samuel Hine

Photography by Amy Troost

High above Canal Street in New York's Chinatown neighborhood, the early spring sun is shining through antique lace curtains. Emily Adams Bode Aujla is sitting on a velvet-cushioned couch in her former apartment, which she and her husband, the interior designer Aaron Aujla, recently vacated.

The airy loft is now the latest expansion of the Bode-verse: the brand's new fine-tailoring studio, where clients can get fitted for suiting and other custom garments. This is in addition to Bode's NYC flagship store around the corner and a smaller tailor shop next door; The River, a Bode-fied bar Emily and Aaron co-own close by; a 3,000-square-foot shop in Los Angeles; and several planned retail stores elsewhere in the world. The stores all stock Bode's rapidly expanding and evolving ready-to-wear collections, which are richly considered explorations of material culture, guided by Emily's family histories. Hanging alongside are the brand's famous one-off pieces that reveal fecund seams of bygone craft, in the form of shirts made of hand-mended French linens and coats cut from midcentury plaid blankets.

Emily and Aaron lived in this apartment for nearly five years before opting to move to a quiet block in the West Village. The hand-operated elevator in the building began to feel impractical with a baby on the way. But the renovations on the new place aren't done, and while Aaron visits clothing factories in India, Emily is staying in a hotel. "Couldn't I just sleep here?" Emily, 34, says of the old place. "Because it does still feel like my apartment."

As with everything in the world of Bode, that effect is by design. The bedroom has been converted into a changing room, and there are bolts of fabric where a library used to be. But the immensely vibey Douglas fir–clad apartment still retains the warmth and character that made the space—by Aaron and Benjamin Bloomstein's design firm, Green River Project—an interiors-magazine favorite. An employee tends to a Moka coffee pot on the tiny stove while Japanese incense burns in the corner. A teak ashtray stocked with American Spirits sits on the table in front of me. The couple's large and almost absurdly photogenic German wirehaired pointing griffon, Monday, is not around, but it's easy to imagine him tenderly snoozing in the corner.

The studio isn't technically open yet, save for the kind of appointment that will happen shortly: The photographer Tyler Mitchell is on his way to get fitted up for a tuxedo to wear to the Met Gala. Even when it was still their apartment, Emily and Aaron hosted fittings for Met Gala attendees like Lorde and Mitchell—a repeat customer—in their living room. "Aaron would bring clients here, and I would bring clients here. Because it's so important to have that feel comfortable," Emily says. Mitchell, a core member of the international Bode fan club, arrives wearing a Bode sweater and zip-up canvas jacket covered in folksy brass charms handmade in Switzerland.

A good deal of the comfort comes from the fact that Emily and Aaron—her partner in creativity and business as well as in life—are aesthetes with a deeply grooved sensibility, a kind of taste that often takes an entire lifetime to develop and which has defined the young brand. Emily tells me, "It's about building the world, and having the product fall within it." I first met Emily in 2018, when Bode HQ was her one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, from which she sold one-of-a-kind jackets cut from timeworn quilts and overshirts made from heavy coverlets. Though in business barely two years, it felt like Bode had been around for a long time. The garments, cut in simple, boxy silhouettes, looked sturdy and luxurious, and unlike anything else on the market. I was even more struck by what Emily wished to talk about: not just her beautiful clothes but how she wanted to help preserve the American traditions woven throughout her small but growing collection.

If there were other emerging designers at the time with ambitious goals that far eclipsed simply obtaining money and influence, I didn't meet them. I’ve stayed close to Emily and Aaron, and their work, ever since, and have consequently had a front row seat to both the growth of their business and the proliferation of their aesthetic throughout fashion and the wider world. Most days, I find myself wearing at least one piece of Bode clothing.

Emily is, unsurprisingly, a keen student of history. And her captivating vision was built in the vein of great American fashion designers who came before her. None more so than her inspiration Ralph Lauren, whose love of cinema turned him into a pioneer of contextualizing clothing in a richly detailed world of lifestyle fantasy. Of Lauren, Emily says, "I just admire the vision that he had for encompassing an entire culture of dressing. Because that was always something that I wanted to do."

Before Ralph Lauren merchandised his entire collection together at Bloomingdale's in 1970, rather than in separate departments, it was novel for retail stores to sell a designer's collection together. Now, every fashion brand feels the need to articulate the world around its clothing, the alluring marketing context that makes one brand's white button-down more enticing than another. Emily and Aaron are taking it one step further. In 1986, Ralph Lauren opened a flagship store in an epic Gilded Age mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side—a maze of warm, Waspy home interiors meant to evoke a country estate, a marvel of aesthetically coherent retail. But Ralph never actually lived there.

Emily is tapping into something different, something menswear hasn't seen before. Everybody who has shopped for designer clothing knows what it's like to dress up in someone else's fantasy. Bode evokes a less familiar feeling. Her world, full of family history and records of forgotten artisanship, tends to stir up wistful memories. It's so specific that you’d think it would fail to speak to a broad audience. But instead, it has deeply resonated. Thumbing through a rack of Bode clothing brings to mind the sense of curiosity and discovery you might feel when sifting through a grandparent's attic or a tucked-away antiques shop in an unfamiliar city. You can perceive echoes of a romantic old way of living, of shared American mythologies, of Betsy Ross and Gee's Bend, the crowded prewar Lower East Side and serene summer nights in New England. It's not a history book so much as a version of a cherished family album that's been passed down for generations. "When Emily does Cape Cod, she's channeling an experience that's so specific and weird, it doesn't read anything like the Kennedys’ Cape Cod, you know?" explained Aaron on a separate occasion, whose Indian heritage has also opened Emily's Americana to heady global influences.

"Going to Bode for the first time felt like walking into a dream," Connor Sullivan, a 37-year-old lawyer, told me, of the brand's store in New York. Sullivan was so captivated by the experience that when he got married last fall, he ordered a custom Bode dinner jacket for the rehearsal dinner. "The vividness and articulate force of the vision that's expressed in all of these clothes, I found so overwhelming and enchanting right away. There's a word in Portuguese that's like nostalgia for something that never happened—that's how I feel about Bode clothes…. As if it's part of a past world that I’ve longed for without even knowing that I was longing for it."

On Fisher Smith: Jacket, $3,600, shirt, $330, pants, $1,800, and shoes, $760, by Bode. Stockings, stylist's own. On Marie Pelletiere: Jacket, $1,800, top, $1,280, pants, $920, shoes, $720, and earrings, $249, by Bode. Bracelet, her own. Stockings, stylist's own.

Emily founded the brand in 2016, but the idea had existed within her in one form or another for a long time. "It's hard to tell when I started Bode," she tells me. At the Parsons School of Design, where she studied fashion design, alongside philosophy at Eugene Lang College, her goal was to land a design job at Abercrombie & Fitch, but her life's dream was to end up working at Ralph Lauren. Eventually, maybe she would open a store. Emily's abiding belief is that clothing is meant to be worn and cherished, and in college while her peers were draping fabrics on mannequins, she was pulling all-nighters sewing clothes for her and her friends to wear to parties.

"Way before Bode was even a thought, you could see the savage dedication to her craft and her art," her friend and former roommate, the artist and musician Kurt Beers, told me. "You could tell that even if she were to fail, it didn't matter because she was going to do it anyway."

At Parsons, Emily stood out among her peers. She has always lived a little out of time, in a way that feels unusual and charming. She has long, shiny dark brown hair and wears corduroy trousers from the ’60s and vintage Chanel. Where she goes, a cornucopia of antique objets d’art tends to spring up—from the early-20th-century stoneware pitcher holding white ranunculus in the tailoring studio to the enormous collection of museum-quality quilts she has purchased and preserved over the years.

During her college thesis presentation, a beachy collection of trousers and knit tank tops in a room full of avant-garde fashion designs, her professor calmed down a panicky Emily with a prescient observation. Her friends had already bought her clothes. "I was in a different kind of mindset" from everyone else, she recalls. Though she was intimidated by her peers’ technical and artistic skills, her professor, she tells me, saw the contours of a thriving menswear line. "He was like, ‘You’ll probably have the most successful business.’ "

She graduated from Parsons in 2013 and earned her philosophy degree the next year. Soon she landed a job offer from Abercrombie and was interviewing at Ralph Lauren. "Neither quite made sense for where I was in my life," she says. "I wanted to start my own thing."

In 2012, Aaron was working as an artist and assisting in the studio of the painter Nate Lowman, and that summer he co-curated a show called Summer at the gallery Karma, an early experiment in the kinds of transportative retail Aaron and Emily would eventually master. The idea was to create, from scratch, a New England seaside shop in the middle of the West Village, and Aaron tapped Emily to make rustic satchels out of antique flags, tent canvas, and winter socks for the show. In the exhibition, Emily tells me, "There was a through line to both of our lives, for domesticity and New England and craft." The leather tags read "Bode for Summer."

On Malik Anderson: Shirt, $520 pants, $1,230, and shoes, $760, by Bode. Stockings, stylist's own. Earrings, his own.

Emily fondly recalls her childhood, which was spent in Atlanta, with family vacations to Cape Cod (her parents are from Massachusetts). Her father is a doctor, her mother a painter and homemaker. Holidays were a big deal in the Bode household, with her grandfather arranging elaborate scavenger hunts for July Fourth. They had their own annual rituals for Halloween and Valentine's Day, too, which began with marathon crafting sessions. (When Emily interned at Marc Jacobs in college, she made Valentine's Day cards for the entire office. "My bosses were like, This is strange," she recalls.) She credits her mother, Janet, and Janet's aunts—the Rice sisters, who in old photographs look practically identical to one another and to Emily now—with encouraging her interest in collecting and antiquing, an obsession that started early. In a story that has become Bode family lore, she picked out her own high chair, a spindly wooden design from the 19th century, which today sits in Bode's Brooklyn design studio. She was four years old.

In the tailoring studio on Canal Street, wisps of incense lazily float through the air. "Since the very beginning, I felt this intrinsic value to vintage clothing or to my family's objects," like her grandfather's bow ties, Emily says. She has an almost preternatural ability to hear the stories these kinds of objects can tell, from priceless wovens to the little personal effects you might find in a forgotten drawer in a relative's house that reveals something special about who they are. "I knew there was something there, in these idiosyncrasies of the way people dressed, what they believed in, the way they built their homes, the way they cultivated their minds. It is so particular."

When Bode officially launched in 2016, the brand quickly found fans, even if it took the menswear establishment a little more time to catch on. Emily's extreme personal approach to designing clothing was so new and different that some in the industry weren't sure what to make of it. "People that I was speaking to, no one could understand what I was doing," Emily says. The product also cut against the trend of luxury streetwear that was selling at the time. At one sales appointment, Emily says, a major men's store passed, calling the now-classic Bode overshirts "a little too heavy and boxy."

"At the end of the day, I wanted to change the way in which people get dressed."

In those days, almost everything Bode sold was made from vintage fabrics, and critics questioned whether Emily could achieve any sort of scale. I know because I was one of them, raising this same point in the kitchen of her Lower East Side apartment in 2018, surrounded by her latest collection. As she explained to me at the time, she was already developing her own textiles so she didn't have to rely on hard-to-find antique yardage. Which also opened up new design possibilities: She could replicate priceless antiques with better workmanship, or spin them into new designs with a creative flick of her wrist, while keeping runs small to stay true to the collectibility and rarity of the original objects. These days, those reproductions are a bedrock of the business.

In 2023, Bode is at the vanguard of a new era of classic American clothing. Spend enough time in New York or LA and Emily's influence is palpable. She was not the first designer to make garments out of antique materials, but men were also not walking around wearing fine quilting and sleek leather slippers several years ago. In Bode's world of highly enviable taste, borderline precious garments like French-lace shirting feel irresistible. (The Bode guy, she imagines, is a dude whose bed is made with crisp white sheets and floral pillowcases.) Celebrities including Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar, Emma Corrin, Donald Glover, Chris Pine, and Jay-Z have also adopted Bode's soft-edged sophistication.

"At the end of the day, I wanted to change the way in which people dressed," she says. Which, to her, isn't merely a stylistic concern. The idea isn't to clothe the world in quilts, necessarily—it is to nudge people's attitudes toward clothing back several generations. "The goal was to encourage people to get back into wanting to repair and alter and make clothes and appreciate them and preserve them." To think of every garment you buy as a potential heirloom. Which, come to think of it, feels as modern an approach to stocking your closet as any.

Emily's unique vision has won her fans across the industry. "America needs the next generation of designers," the fashion designer and CFDA chairman Thom Browne, who knows a thing or two about jolting the world of traditional menswear, told me. "And over the last 20 years that I’ve been around, unfortunately you do see that there's so many talented people that just don't exist anymore." According to Browne, Emily has stepped up during this moment of change. "I feel Emily is one of the few that will succeed, because she's not only really talented and creative and secure in what she wants to do, she's also really smart and she's driven," he said. "She just has what it takes."

Emily recognizes that not everyone thinks about objects the way she does. There's a reason why she has filled her life with so many quilts, trinkets, and clothes of immense sentimental value—because whoever owned those things, or whoever inherited them, unsentimentally got rid of them at some point. Emily, who once told me she's an "organized hoarder," thinks of it all as furnishings for her world, so that when you step into it, you might want to take something home with you. "It's this idea of ‘I’m collecting these things to share,’ " said Beers. "Emily is not a collector to hold and to gatekeep. She's the opposite of that. I think the evolution of Bode for her was as a way to share her collection in the most comforting way, which is by actually putting it on you."

In December, I dropped by Bode's sprawling warehouse office in Brooklyn, where most of the brand's 100-plus employees work across some 14,000 square feet. Bode tailors share space with 2,000 quilts, some hailing from the 1840s, most of which are folded and stacked in high piles on industrial shelving that stretches around busy work tables. Emily also owns hundreds of rugs, over 2,500 bolts of vintage wool suiting fabric, 800 embroidered French linens from the 1920s, 1,200 midcentury tablecloths, and over 1 million antique American pearl buttons. It's like the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark crossed with an upscale flea market.

The brand recently hired an archivist from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to lead the effort to catalog the extensive and increasingly important collection. But today the sorting could wait. It was about a month before the Bode fall-winter 2023 show in Paris, the brand's highest-stakes presentation yet. Bode had shown twice before in Paris, but not for three years, and not nearly on the scale Emily was envisioning for the long-awaited return.

She had just collected her second of back-to-back CFDA American Menswear Designer of the Year awards (besting Browne and several other fashion luminaries), and business was booming at the Bode retail stores. She had also recently secured the bode.com domain name from a lawyer, who, she told me, had been following the rise of the brand from afar. Apparently, he was childhood friends with one of Ralph Lauren's brothers, and when it came time to retire, she said, he got in touch with her. Emily explained he wanted her to have the domain name because, thanks to his friend, he knew how hard it was to build a clothing brand.

Emily and Aaron were more than happy to take the cosmic cosign. Because the task before them, conquering Paris, is perhaps one of the most challenging parts of building an enduring American menswear brand. Though Paris is the capital of the international fashion industry, few American menswear brands currently show there. The French establishment often appears to take a haughty attitude toward Stateside designers, and domestic brands find it hard to define themselves against Europe's deep-pocketed heritage luxury houses. In January, Emily was one of a handful of young American designers on the official men's show schedule.

In Brooklyn, the challenges were already presenting themselves. Since Bode's last show in Paris, before the COVID-19 outbreak, its collections had grown larger and more ambitious. Bode employees were getting ready to fly to India and Portugal to pick up finished garments that would be hand-carried to Paris, the only way to get them there in time. Others had recently returned from Peru. It is also, not surprisingly, a very expensive endeavor to show in Paris. "So we got the Paris budget into a really good place, but for hair and makeup, there's a question of sponsorship," Aaron told Emily when he walked into her office. "Okay, what does a sponsor need?" she asked him. "Instagram posts," he replied. "It's not cool."

Runway prototypes were starting to trickle in, and Emily and Aaron walked into a studio where they were staging the collection to style a promotional video, a vignette set in the early ’70s featuring some models in the back of a pickup truck, which would announce the show on Instagram. An assistant—who, with long dark brown hair, has been mistaken for Emily—stood by to try things on from several racks loaded with Bode samples. "Honestly, they should just be wearing vintage clothes," Aaron said of the handful of models that would be appearing in the video. "Well, luckily we make clothes that look like vintage clothes," Emily replied, grabbing a suede Bode jacket.

Aaron began setting aside garments that looked too "fashion." The resulting video would last all of 15 seconds, but Emily and Aaron take the little marketing they do incredibly seriously. Their taste is not just an aesthetic sensibility but a finely tuned business practice. The forthcoming collection was inspired by a time in the life of Emily's mom, the summer of 1976, when Janet worked on a Woods Hole, Massachusetts, estate attending to the wealthy 90-year-old lady of the manor who insisted on wearing antique gowns to her solitary nightly dinners. It's a tale that feels like the basis for a boldly costumed A24 film—Emily's family lore has a way of taking on cinematic qualities. "Same with the show," Aaron continued. "It's got to just be really true to telling the story of Emily's mom in that moment, period. If it varies to be like, Look at what we’re offering—" he put another Bode sweater in the outs pile. "People are so smart, basically. It's like with interiors. If you walk into a place where you’re like, ‘I know what's going on here, with the interior design trends and the world and the industry today,’ you’ve already lost."

Dress, $2,900, by Bode. Stockings, stylist's own. Bracelet, her own.

As with the apartment turned haberdashery, Emily and Aaron's efforts to manifest their brand in the actual world are unusual and ambitious. "Our thing is just, how real can we get?" said Aaron. "It feels like that line is the scariest one." Brands often hold cocktail parties filled with models to showcase collections, a concept Emily and Aaron made all the more intimate by designing and unveiling Bode pre-fall 2022 at their actual wedding in the fall of 2021, to which I was invited. Those cocktail presentations can often feel strange, like you’re wandering around a maze of breathing mannequins in search of a flute of champagne. But the Bode-ness of the wedding, held at the couple's house in rural Connecticut, only heightened the pageantry.

For the Punjabi ceremonies, members of the wedding party wore Bode garments gilded with fine Indian thread work. In a nod to Emily's Southern and New England traditions, Aaron's white tuxedo was seersucker, and the reception MC, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, donned tails inspired by Emily's grandfather's Yale graduation suit. "With the wedding collection, we were just like, Let's actually do our wedding," Aaron said. "The counterpoint of that could be, ‘Oh, you’re using your wedding to market your thing.’ But that's almost preferred than us drumming up a new thing to do just for the sake of having a new collection." With a no-photos policy, the nuptials only felt like an ultraexclusive fashion presentation if you thought about it too hard, and I don't recall anybody so much as noting that many of the threads guests were wearing, down to custom-embroidered lobster bibs at dinner, would be for sale six months later.

As Bode has expanded, the brand has evolved in unique and unexpected ways. After opening only its second retail store, in LA in early 2022, Emily and Aaron, along with Aaron's business partner, Benjamin Bloomstein, unveiled a saloon in New York's Chinatown called The River. Jumping into hospitality is an audacious gamble for anyone, but especially for a growing fashion brand. Nevertheless, it has become something like the Polo Bar of the downtown art-and-fashion scene, a place for like-minded, quilt-pilled aesthetes to hang out and down martinis in a space as heavily accented with dark wood and warm lighting as a Bode store. "It's like drinking in another part of your apartment, just a more awesome part of your apartment," said the lawyer and Bode customer Connor Sullivan.

As with any brand that is surging in popularity, the aesthetic signatures of Bode are now being emulated across the industry, from commercial heavyweights selling quilted pieces to small upstarts betting the house on fine embroidery and artisanal linens. But Emily is sanguine about this crowding, perhaps because she knows her deeply coded taste, ultimately, is not replicable. "I think at the end of the day, if someone's being thoughtful you can see it," she says when we’re on Canal Street. "It doesn't really bother us as much as it maybe did when I was younger. I think Aaron and I have such a clear vision, that we know where we’re going, and we know what we’re doing next."

A month later, the holidays had come and gone and it was showtime in Paris. Emily and Aaron had spent the previous week building the boldest version of the Bode-verse yet, behind the velvet curtain of the historic Théâtre du Châtelet in the 1st arrondissement.

A half hour before the show, Emily dipped in and out of the dressing rooms, putting the finishing touches on a pair of elegant male models, each wearing garments covered in delicate brocade. Elsewhere, the energy was frenzied: Late-arriving models were being rushed through hair and makeup, and members of her staff were scampering to and fro through the dark backstage passageways. Emily was feeling good about the set design and the clothes, but she was nevertheless nervous—they were, after all, about to put on an incredibly expensive show, followed up by sales appointments with their 100-plus global retailers, on the cusp of a forecasted global recession. (Paris Fashion Week Men's, held in January and June, is followed by "market week," when store buyers whip out their order books.)

"We’re talking about a really specific worldview about family and preservation and craft and timelessness."

When Emily is nervous, she gets quiet, which in the moment appeared to focus everyone around her. As she turned her attention to a cream ribbon scarf, tying it gently around the nape of a model's neck, the handful of helpers around her closely followed her every motion.

All week, I had been interviewing fashion designers about their collections and had heard a lot about fine artists and gender fluidity. Emily's storytelling, on the other hand, can get almost preposterously specific. The brand's Paris debut, in June 2019, was filled with equestrian silk coats and trousers, inspired by the wagon-manufacturing company her ancestors established in Cincinnati, which in the early 1900s produced the elaborate circus caravans used by the Ringling Brothers. But the effect is much more universal: The clothes could be homemade, or heirlooms, or luxury fashion. Bode occupies the center of that nostalgic matrix. "Other companies that kind of sit in our sphere are selling a different kind of narrative," Emily said. "We’re talking about a really specific worldview about family and preservation and craft and timelessness."

In Paris, Emily and Aaron were determined to prove that they could showcase their sentimental, highly detailed world in a scene where the operative word is commercial. "It's easy to have an epic fashion show with the music and the lights and the beat and all of that," Emily told me. "But for our show, it's so important to hone in on what makes us truly who we are, from an emotional standpoint." As Aaron tracked down a cold bottle of Champagne backstage, the theater began to fill up. Many of the guests had last been in this room in 2021, when Balenciaga took over the theater for a celebrity-packed screening of a Balenciaga-themed episode of The Simpsons, the entrance a paparazzi-lined red carpet for the likes of Cardi B and Lewis Hamilton.

The Bode crowd was heavier on painters, writers, and the odd Parisian client. It looked more like another night at the opera than a high-wattage runway show. (Over a month later, in a coincidental but not entirely unrelated twist following its recent ad scandals, Balenciaga signaled a pivot away from clout-drenched fashion-tainment methods of presentation, leaving notes at its Paris show that posited a focus on the "essence" of fashion and "creat[ing] relationships between body and fabric." The zeitgeist, in other words, had shifted in Bode's favor.) Over the years, Bode has mastered how to bring the runway show back down to earth. In a series of presentations during New York Fashion Week, languorous models draped in opulent fabrics laid around on Green River Project furniture. In one instance, a band of Emily's friends played rock-and-roll covers—less a fashion presentation and more just a good hang.

Jacket, $890, sweater (worn over jacket), $640, and shoes, $720, by Bode. Vintage jumpsuit. Jewelry, her own.

As the lights went down inside, a solitary figure crossed the stage and stepped into the spotlight: Emily's French-born Uncle Franck, who surprised her by flying in from California for the show. "Family is very important in Emily's life," Franck told the rapt audience in accented English. "Lately, we have been talking a lot about family." His wife, Nancy, Emily's aunt and Janet's sister, had passed away just months before. This, it turns out, was not an opera but an elegy: "I’ve been telling Emily and Aaron that if you’re lucky one day, you will, any one of you, will suffer as much as I am suffering right now," Franck concluded. "Because it means that you would have loved deeply." In New York, Emily said of her aunt, "She was very influential in my style and why I became a designer and why I collect things…. This collection is especially sentimental because of that." It felt like we were all being given a seat at a remarkable family reunion—a peculiar experience, but a vividly real and beautiful moment during a week of artifice and flash.

As the audience members dabbed their eyes, the curtain rose on a scene so quaint it moved at least one attendee to tears a second time. Aaron and Bloomstein had constructed a tranquil slice of Janet's Woods Hole summer from 1976, erecting a white-sided Cape Cod–style house on the stage, which was covered in thousands of pounds of gravel. Next to the house was a tiny shed, an American flag stirring gently atop a flagpole planted on stage left. The scene was soundtracked by gentle piano music, barely louder than the models’ opera pumps crunching across the gravel.

Emily's maternal tribute reached an even higher level of sophistication and beauty than her collections before. Alongside the neo-flappers in spangly dresses, the male models—inspired by Janet's "gentleman callers"—strolled out of the house in trim cropped blazers and distinguished shawl-belted coats. Motifs that have carried through Bode collections, notably floral embroideries, folksy brocade, and campy embellishments (like sequined Champagne bottles and grapes dancing across a tuxedo) were rendered in finer color and detail than ever before.

French critics were ecstatic at Bode's latest evolution. "Silhouette after silhouette, Emily Bode's extreme poetry wins over the public," said Le Figaro, calling Emily "a designer with a strong and poetic universe." Now, she and Aaron are eyeing Paris for their next retail store.

After the show, guests in handmade knits poked around Woods Hole–on–the–Seine, marveling at the miniature mudroom constructed by Aaron and Bloomstein inside the house, with slippers strewn about the tile and plaid shirts hanging from humble wooden pegs. Emily's mother stood gazing at the scene, clearly somewhat floored at seeing a moment in her life play out 50 years later on one of fashion's biggest stages. The previous 10 minutes had put to rest any lingering doubts that Emily's autobiographical creative process is in any way limiting. The merging of her history and family with art and fashion had become total, and the effect was more profound than ever. In this little reconstructed memory, among the antiques and heirlooms that populate her world, it seemed that nobody wanted to leave. Emily had always wanted to work for Ralph Lauren, but she now says that Bode is the fulfillment of her dreams. It seems she's on her way to becoming the next Ralph Lauren instead.

A while later, on my way out, I ran into Janet waiting to hug her daughter on the gravel-covered stage. "I just love your jacket," Janet told me. I was wearing a kelly green puffer, with snaps up the front, like the kind you might see in a faded photograph from a New England ski trip. "It's so funny—I used to have one just like it," she said with a wink. It was, of course, Bode.

On Smith: Coat, $4,000, sweater-vest, $580, shirt, $660, and pants, $1,500, by Bode. On Anderson: Jacket, $3,200, cardigan, $850, and pants, $650, by Bode.

Samuel Hine is GQ's fashion writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2023 issue of GQ with the title "The Making of the Next Great American Fashion Designer"

PRODUCTION CREDITS:Photographs by Amy TroostStyled by Elissa SantisiHair by Tina Outen at StreetersMakeup by Dick Page at Statement ArtistsSpecial thanks to Nine Orchard