[Rodarte - Sweet Success]

The Rodarte sisters have a truly inspiring

story best captured in this

gothy elusive little interview.

The way they work together is so

anti fashion, anti establishment.

Most mornings, Kate and Laura Mulleavy wake up in their parents’ home, kiss
their mother goodbye at the door and head out to work. When they get to the Starbucks in downtown Los Angeles, they order the same thing. The sisters then head to their design studio, where they sit across from each other at a wide work table, and when the design process becomes intense, they pull out a thin fabric partition to signal that they shouldn’t be disturbed.

As usual in the rag trade, fame has arrived well ahead of fortune and commercial success for the little house of Rodarte. After eight seasons of collections, the sisters’ label is dining on buzz, which the Mulleavys are counting on to tide them over until their evening-dress business reaches critical mass. There’s industry pressure to turn them into a bankable brand—the sisters were among the designers Gap asked to create limited-edition white shirts in 2007, and last year Vogue approached the pair with a four-month regimen intended to help them, in Vogue’s terms, “learn good habits.” They lost a combined 50 pounds. Despite all the attention, the women are an unwavering and united sister act.

Rodarte’s dresses are a gothy art-school tribute to the couture method. Russian ballerina costumes spiked with a downtown edge, festooned with tissue-thin layers of mussed-up chiffon, embellished with silk tulle and worn with shredded, spiderweb tights and stiletto sandals. Linda Fargo, women’s fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, remembers an early Rodarte show in September 2006 where the audience fell silent. “It was like ‘run don’t walk’ to get a closer look at these beautiful dresses that were so romantic and original,” she says.

Kate, now 30, and Laura, 28, grew up in the San Francisco area, and later Pasadena, under the wings of intellectual and free-spirited parents, whom they still regard as their best friends. William, their dad, is a former botanist and professor who specialized in fungi. A licensed pilot, he took his daughters flying on the weekends, and his photographs of spores have been the inspiration for certain Rodarte printed fabrics. Rodarte is the maiden name of his wife, Victoria, an artist who made Navajo weavings and taught her daughters to sew.

Bookish and outdoorsy, Kate and Laura were inseparable growing up. In 2001, after graduating with liberal arts degrees from their dad’s alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, they moved back to their parents’ 1940s-style cottage bungalow, and began mapping out their fashion future. They scraped together about $20,000 in seed money: Kate sold off her prized vintage record collection, 25 milk crates full of rare jazz and rock albums dating back to the 1930s; Laura saved her salary and tips from waitressing at a neighborhood restaurant.