Just before flying to Paris, for the start of several seasons of inspiration (and work), Emily Adams Bode Aujla—Emily, for short—was at home for a birthday party, in this case hers, and like all birthdays, it was a good time to take stock—of Bode, the fashion brand, not to mention the family that makes up the family business. That family has expanded and relocated, as Emily herself noted in a quick chronology of the home team’s progression from Chinatown to Greenwich Village, then to a second place in Greenwich Village in just a few years.
“You have to realize,” Emily said around then, “that what also is happening at the same time as all these moves is, well, we got one dog. I got pregnant, had the baby. It was a girl. And then I got pregnant again. We needed, you know—we had to move for various reasons, including that we were going to have another baby, a boy, and then we got another dog right before he was born.”
We should note, in terms of time and space, that the dogs aren’t just dogs. They’re wirehaired pointing griffons, cheerful and gigantic hunting dogs that, in lieu of hunting, are burly, slobbering socializers, adding to the logistical demands of parenthood—one of the reasons why, when we spoke, and when her home team included two children under two, she was momentarily drinking coffee, a slight embarrassment.
“I’m from the South, so I’m an iced tea drinker,” she lamented. “I don’t want to rely on coffee!” Coffee, for Emily, was way back in college, in the early 2010s, when late-night caffeine pushed her through her first men’s clothing ideas that, a few years later, became her Lower East Side–apartment–based Bode. That story is now ancient history: In 2016 she set about simultaneously exploring the family traditions that inspired her—her roots are in New England as well as the area of the Piedmont region better known as Atlanta—and the historic American craft traditions that fascinated her, eventually working in collaboration with her now husband and business partner, Aaron Aujla. As husband and wife have brought on two kids and accompanying griffons (the first one a gift from Emily’s mom, the second one their idea, believe it or not)—as she fought the naysayers who advised against making shirts with vintage quilts or pants cut from gorgeous deadstock fabrics or decorated with, say, buttons discovered in a closed-up Midwestern warehouse—the family business has grown alongside the family: Bode has become a global brand with an ever-growing list of stores in the US and overseas.
On a visit to their house not long after they moved in, I asked Emily to reflect on how things had changed from only a few years back, when the world was wondering if she’d ever launch a women’s collection—until she showed reimagined bolero jackets and gowns and sheer dresses that segued between past and present. At the time, she and Aaron had just opened up an LA store (there are now also two in New York and one in Paris) and gotten married in the Connecticut country house that Aujla had only just renovated with Benjamin Bloomstein, Aujla’s partner in Green River Project, the interior design firm and furniture maker. And when she looks back, she is almost surprised. “What’s wildly changed is that now we’re venturing into different parts of the world in a way that we had never done before, at the same time that we’re getting our feet even more grounded here,” she says. “It’s kind of like this bizarre juxtaposition, right? We’re growing our nuclear family here, but our fingers are going into different parts of the world.”
The second thing she lands on is, well, her life in general, which, here at the Bode home base, seems all-encompassing, or even panoramic, in terms of both living creatures and all the inanimate objects that have memories and associations that inspire and compel her. Today, Emily’s schedule involves that birthday party (she’s 36, a Gemini), as well as prepping the children for Mom’s imminent trip to Paris. They are aided by a team, also present, that includes two on-site grandmothers watching over Emily and Aaron’s kids—Bibhutibhushan (Bibhuti for short), then nearly two, named for the Bengali writer whose work was adapted by Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker, whose films both Emily and Aaron revere; and Indus, then a mere four months old. Though Emily is not naming names, Indus is likely the impetus for the caffeine. “You know, to get up at crack of dawn with the baby….”
And then there are those dogs: Monday, who trots blithely alongside Tuesday, who together feel like the size of the rest of the week. “We spend a lot of time with family,” Emily says.
Family time befits a family business, of course: Bode is run by Emily and Aaron and Aaron’s brother, Dev. And family time, in the Bode world, also shakes up the well for inspiration. Case in point: The spring 2026 collection that premiered in Paris shortly after her birthday is an homage to an extended relation by marriage—Bill Charlap, the Grammy-winning jazz pianist, whose father, Moose Charlap, was the composer best known for the 1954 Broadway hit Peter Pan and the 1966 live musical of Alice Through the Looking Glass. The younger Charlap married Aaron’s aunt, and on holidays gave Emily, by relaying his father’s stories, glimpses into the 1950s Paris and New York that inspired her latest collection.
The resulting salon–cum–fashion show was consummate Bode in that it ignored the basic rules of Paris fashion shows. A photographer who showed up early at Paris’s Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique and asked to be pointed toward models on a runway was startled to learn that the clothes were arranged in miniature on tiny 12-inch-tall dolls, the event more like a series of maquettes or a film or a Bode-esque theater of the everyday. Likewise, the looks were associated with not one season, but several, making room for play and time for ideas to grow. “I do think that’s the beauty of the way Aaron and I work,” Emily says. “We want the opportunity to create a world in which we can dive deeper into what inspires us—we can actually spend years on something, researching and working with the materials or the techniques that we’ve fallen in love with in many different iterations.”
Replacing the runway walk was Charlap, mostly musing on craft, the big Bode theme—at a piano, he played a tune and, deploying deep skill and an array of references, transformed it into something more magnificent, something that made Maggie Rogers beam from her seat in the audience. “Craft is where it’s all at,” Charlap said.
Especially for Bode, in this case exploring the Paris of the elder Charlap. The dolls were like sketches, and among the pieces born from these miniature looks was a flapper dress inspired by Bal Bullier, the Belle Époque Parisian dance hall that, in 1913, Sonia Delaunay famously depicted in a panorama of moving color. The Bode dress is immaculately detailed with bronze beads and crystal rhinestones, like wearable architecture. A gilt jacket’s wide collar, meanwhile—detailed with gold bullion embroidery discovered on a towel from the Ottoman Empire—has a grosgrain ribbon for a dreamlike tie. The Velvet Bannister Dress, with row upon row of hand-applied velvet ribbon, channels Paris in the 1880s.
The house where two dogs and two children roam reasonably freely is a gallery of things collected and things constructed by Green River Project. Everywhere are Prussian blue chintz curtains and robin’s-egg blue walls—the walls a nod to the late French decorator and antiquarian Madeleine Castaing; the curtains dating from the 1850s, hand-block-printed florals over a roller-printed striped ground. In Bibhuti’s room, the bed’s headboard is a hand-painted river valley, the bed a memento of a departed friend and antiques dealer. It is surrounded by embroidered French muslin Cornely curtains, dyed blue. (There’s a crib for Bibhuti; the bed is for a grandma.) In the sitting room, before a 1920s mural salvaged from an old Brooklyn theater, a black-piano-lacquered Green River Project table strikes up a conversation with a Frank Lloyd Wright lamp. Paper garlands of foldable lanterns and honeycomb fruit from 1950s Japan and Denmark dangle over a British Art Deco carpet in a cool green that both Emily and Aaron adore.
A long Green River table that survived the Chinatown move is surrounded by decommissioned Bengali government office cabinets that line the walls and display more mementos: tea cups from Eric Wrenn; various ancient Alsatian yellowware plates and terrines; a Savoyard pitcher, circa 1890s; a souvenir book (made from a shell) that includes seaweed specimens from a maritime disaster; and a pair of hand-painted cloth dolls from India. “Complete with mirror-work and miniature jewelry,” says Emily. The blue Art Deco chairs are beloved by one and all, human and nonhuman—the dogs, naturally, being the elephants in the room. “They’re good in the house,” Aaron says. “I mean, things get destroyed—often. But there’s nothing too fussy.”
“Bibhuti likes to crawl up here, like, mid-dinner,” says Emily, indicating the route of sofa ascent, “and then she rubs her head here. And Monday and Tuesday do the same thing—I mean, what are you going to do?” The fabric maven muses about how inanimate things receive memories. “They just kind of disappear into the textile, and it becomes lived in.”
Aaron’s design mantra for the Bode stores is about simplicity (“How would this room come to be if it was 1925?”), while at home he works with his wife’s ever-expanding vintage collections in mind. “We’re so intertwined at this point,” he says. Then again, blending home and work was always the goal for Emily. “I haven’t changed,” she says. “I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I was building my business in a way that I thought might be for generations—those are my hopes and dreams.”
Just before a visitor departs, he spots the tent: child-size and homemade, inspired by Emily’s late aunt, who once fashioned one for a grandson. “I wanted to make it like a circus tent,” Emily says, and so she did, with fabric she’d used for clothes, with vintage trim. “It’s got a really nice red glow inside,” Emily adds. “Tuesday loves to go inside the tent with Bibhuti—and Bibhuti, of course, thinks that’s the most fantastic thing. Bibhuti and Tuesday are best friends.” Emily’s plans for the tent are to add to it, to repair it when necessary, and to have it for a long time—and then, when it’s time, to pass it on.
In this story: hair and makeup, Allie Smith.
Produced by CLM.