2008, "Interview with Rodarte's Kate Mulleavy," Grauvre

Rachel K. Ward: You are based in Pasadena. The Huntington Estate is such an amazing place. Is there anything specific about California that has influenced your vision?

Kate Mulleavy: I grew up in Northern California so I think, on the whole, California in general had a huge influence on our perspectives on design. We grew up in a small town right next to Santa Cruz. We tell people this a lot, that Santa Cruz is where the movie The Lost Boys was based and filmed. It is a really great, amazing place filled with so many different characters, like street punks, psychedelic skaters, surfers and yuppies, anything you can think of. It is a really weird, interesting place, in terms of politics and the extremely beautiful environment. It is Steinbeck country in a way, like Monterey, Carmel, Capitola and Santa Cruz. My father was a botanist so we grew up with these really amazing redwood forests and incredible greenhouses and always at the beach. A lot of our early memories are spending time at tide pools. Northern California landscape is staggering. It is probably one of the most beautiful places in the United States. It's incredible. Our grandparents and parents were raised in Los Angeles so we always spent a lot of time in L.A. and in Pasadena. After we finished school our parents had moved and so we moved to Pasadena. That had a huge influence on us as well. Pasadena is an interesting place because it is one of the older suburbs of L.A. It was originally built as a tourist destination for people coming from the east coast so there are all these older hotels and it is an older community in terms of houses, a place where every house is different. For L.A. if something survives a hundred years it is a pretty big deal. In Pasadena, the Huntington Gardens is one of my favorite places in the world. Laura and I were always really obsessed with "pink perfection," one of the oldest Camellia trees in California. The Huntington estate was built on that property because of that tree. It's really amazing to see the left over railroad systems that were used to have all the art brought in on trains that led up to the house. Something that is also interesting to me is the mythology of the west and how it spilled over. I think of people like Van Dyke Parks and John Lennon and their time in Los Angeles. There are all these amazing layers to it so I feel like it definitely had a huge influence on us.

RKW: What are your feelings about New York?

KM: I love New York city. I think Laura and I had an idea of the east coast that was shaped by E.B. White or J.D. Salinger. I would think about the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is hard for me to describe but I felt like it was some type of contained world, almost like Charles Shultz' Peanuts. As kids, we never went. We only visited for the first time because of work. So it was interesting that the first time I went to New York City was to go show a small collection that we had done. For me New York was like having seen a city in a snow globe. I just had this magical view of it shaped by films and books and the amazing thing about New York City is that it really lives it up to it. The more I spend time travelling there the more it seems like one of the greatest places, so that is what I think is magical about that city.

RKW: Beyond east or west coast, in terms of the world at large, do you think your work has an American identity to it?

KM: In a lot of ways it does. The fact that Laura and I started something out of a gut feeling that we felt we were meant to do something. We kind of jumped into it in a lot ways. We didn't have formal training. I think that that is kind of indicative of an American. Some of the interesting things about America is a naïve quality and then at the same time a more fierce determination. So I feel like that is reflective of that but also in terms of our sensibility, personally. I feel like there is a sensibility to our clothes that was shaped so much by where we grew up and the experiences we had. I think we never really polarized the difference between New York or L.A. in our minds, we always wanted to show in New York because was always associated it with the tradition of American fashion. But in terms of considering ourselves New York, or L.A. was never really a question, it was almost like a combination of the two, which is American.

RKW: So how do you see the positioning of your work among designers?

KM: I think that what we like to do is try to create from a place that is very personal. Every season we try to discover and push our vision and voice a little bit further. I don't think we were ever married to the idea that in a few years we would understand what our vision is because I think as a designer you spend your whole like figuring that out and working that out and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone in terms of those things. I really feel like there is a creative drive. We have always believed that no matter where you are from, as a designer you are creating your own word. Laura and I are very tied to this idea of creating clothes that we felt like were very thought out and meticulous and also reflective of what our inspiration and interests are, but I wouldn't tie it to one philosophy or the other. There are some American designers and some European designers that I feel a parallel and importance and dialogue with in both aesthetics and approaches.

RKW: Since you are sisters working together, I wondering if when you were children if you had a lot of fantasy play, if you started early in your collaborations?

KM: We were always really connected in a weird way. My mom always tells this story that she gave us each a journal. I was six and Laura was five at the time. I sketched out all these crazy outfits throughout the entire journal. My mom thought this was kind of weird. Then Laura went in the house and made maps where everything was, like "the sugar is here," where we kept the spoons. Later in life I realized it was so tied to our personalities. I can't see creating without Laura and I think Laura feels the same way. So in a weird way we are always together in some sense. I can remember small things like on Laura's birthday I decided to direct a play. We were 8. We made all of our friends practice and we designed dresses and costumes and it was this huge thing. I felt like we were always trying to make something together. I remember building a lot of forts with Laura. That's what we did together. We had adventures and lived in our imaginations.

RKW: When did you start actually creating clothes together?

KM: Not until really seriously until after college. We had grown up being able to sell our clothes and things like that. I knew I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was really young and Laura did too but we also had a lot of other interests and so because of that we weren't sure. When we were in school I was an Art History major and Laura was an English major and her interest was the Irish modern novel and she was taking art history classes too, plus she was going to do stuff in science. We just had so many different interests and I think it took us awhile through the experience of being undergraduates in school to really say, toward the tail end of that, that we were certain what we wanted to do. We knew we wanted to make clothes and I think at that point we just decided to move back home to do it. The truth was we thought about going to school at that point and we thought we don't really want to wait because we thought "now we are sure what we want to do." We had taken some costume design classes with the theater department at Berkley but we had kind of dropped out of that. I think at that point we realized we wanted to do something where we had complete creative control. We didn't want to change the color of our taffeta dress because of lighting director. We did do some stuff in college but we made that decision at the very end.

RKW: How do you feel about working with other people like an artist or sponsor?

KM: I think the thing that you realize is that in some ways collaborating with different people like the artist…with artistic collaborations when design is important and interesting it helps you grow as a designer because when you working with someone else who has an expertise it pushes you in terms of gaining more knowledge and taking your idea to a different place. But I also think that as collections have become more varied and broad and I think you also become someone in charge of every detail and in that sense you have numerous collaborations to make this thing possible so I think it is part of the everyday working experience in a way.

RKW: In another interview you mentioned that one of my favorite films Metropolitan (1990) was an inspiration for you. What about that film, or other things, inspire you?

KM: This last collection was inspired by the idea of site specific and earth art, someone like Robert Smithson. Laura and I really thought of the aerial view looking at the Spiral Jetty (1970); it looks like a fossil. This is the idea of ruins, a futurism that instead of it being about a robot, is the future where what is left are these kind of fossils or skeletal forms. We explored a lot of science fiction like The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) or even something like Donnie Darko (2001), which was a huge inspiration on the collection, so there were varied films that came into play in relationship to this idea of earth art. In my mind the connection was this incredible movement with earth artists not that long after the first Apollo missions which was the first moment that anyone saw the earth outside of itself which was a huge intellectual shift for an entire world. There was an immediate link in my mind about space travel and at the same time artists like Robert Smithson. So we tied in films like THX (1971), and different science fiction films that were interesting to us and the collection was based off of these skeletal forms. Then the season before it was based off of Japanese horror films. Usually film and art are huge visual references for what we are doing. I think a lot of the actual ideas for the pieces come out of our own minds. I can't really say why we built a dress the way we did, it really is just something we have in our head and we sketch it. In terms of making a garment, the ideas usually just come from an internal place but the way we tie together the story behind color, which is something we did all hand dying for in the last collection, those kinds of things are guided by the story we are trying to tell. In terms of the film Metropolitan, that is a good example of trying to create your own world. I like the kind of claustrophobia of it and the interior world, that is what is interesting with it. I guess a film like that has a lot of influence for us for the fact we really love it so we will probably do a collection that has really big poofy 80's dresses and teddy bears.

RKW: Imagine we are looking at a history book about 21st Century fashion, how do you think Rodarte is going to be described?

KM: I think the thing that we would hope that people would describe about what we are doing is that it felt like it somehow belonged to us, in a sense that there was something that was unique enough about it that it looked like our vision that was a specific voice and that we had a place among the designers that have done something that is recognizable to the designer. But to me the thing that we seem to be drawn to doing is a balance between something that is very fragile and delicate but also beautiful but also slightly strange. I feel like that tight rope act, between doing something that has such delicate beauty but that is also slightly off kilter or weird, is the balance that I hope people associate with our work.

RKW: Where in the world would you like to take your clothes that they are not yet available?

KM: We are small enough there are a lot places that would be very cool. We don't sell in Mexico City yet. That would be really fun for us. Laura and I are part Mexican so it would be cool to have our clothes in Mexico. That is one place that comes to mind. If we could go back in time, that would be cool and take our clothes by time travel. Maybe we can get a shop on the moon which I know is really evil, but there are just so many different places. But the first answer is Mexico City.