In January of this year, Emily Adams Bode Aujla showed her fall 2024 menswear and womenswear collection, which also introduced to the world Bode Rec., a new line focused on activewear. Many of the models in the look book were sporting vintage-looking Nikes, which were not old styles pulled by the stylist George Cortina but the stars of the American brand’s first-ever collaboration with the sneaker giant. “I’ve done collaborations that were more about technology or competition-based,” the designer explains at her office a few days before the launch. “But I really wanted to do our first brand partnership with Nike, so I held out [for them]. The foundational story of Nike has always been so inspiring to me.”
With Bode Rec., Adams Bode Aujla is exploring the history of American athletic and recreational wear through history and also “the importance of sports in American society”—beliefs that she found she had in common with Nike cofounder Phil Knight, whose book Shoe Dog she’s read multiple times. “There’s this idea of creating yourself to be a more virtuous human being through sport and being a team player,” she says. “I played sports growing up—softball and tennis—so I’ve always believed in that.”
After many years of conversations, the collaboration finally ramped up in the last two and a half years, with Adams Bode Aujla and her team going to Oregon and visiting the Nike archives—or DNA, as they’re called—where she got to see the old space where cofounder Bill Bowerman was “making shoes in the basement.” “I liked the idea that what was foundational to Nike is similar to Bode, in that what they were doing was so natural to them—it was what they were passionate about at the time,” she explains. “Bowerman, who’s since passed away, was experimenting to make a better product, and what was intriguing to me were these little histories of him using his wife’s waffle iron. That was the jumping-off point because I wanted to make sure that was a component of the shoe.”
The sneaker styles are based on the Astrograbber, which was developed after Astroturf was invented in the 1960s. The Bode Rec. and Nike Astrograbber comes in two styles: one in black leather with removable bronze commemorative charms in the shape of a football and a basketball and another in white mesh with colorful plastic charms in the shape of a football, an airplane, a lobster, and a show dog. She has been wearing a similar bronze basketball charm on a bracelet since high school.
The charms tie into the larger narratives around which Adams Bode Aujla built the collection, including the clothes. “We were looking at American athleticwear and recreationalwear beginning around 1756, which is when one of the first-ever recorded boat races took place in the New York harbor between the sailing ship Manhattan—that’s the name of the ship—and the Cape Cod Whaler,” she explains. “Obviously they weren’t wearing this kind of clothing, so the silhouette comes from the things I can remember from childhood and that relationship with sports in my family’s life. My dad played high school and college football in the 1970s.”
As such, the collection is divided into two colorways that match each team: The Cape Cod colorway is a bright blue, and the Manhattan one is an almost-black brown. There are weatherproof track jackets and pants in tonal satin stripes—which can be worn with a matching dickey for a sort of sporty three-piece suit (“I thought it could be what an athlete wears to accept an award or something”)—along with long-sleeve mesh jerseys and woolen Lacing Knits and very 1970s running short-shorts.
They’re all essential pieces of an athletic wardrobe that, although fully made for action, also include signature Bode touches. The side stripes on the track pants are made from velvet ribbon and feature a hand-beaded laurel-leaf motif taken from a French flapper dress from 1922—the first year female athletes were allowed to compete in the Olympics—with an extra-long seam allowance so you can take the hem down if needed. “Okay, so you may not actually go running in these,” Adams Bode Aujla adds, laughing. But you can certainly go running in the Thermal Pant. “It’s one of my favorite things that we learned when we visited the archives,” she explains. “Bill Bowerman was coaching students at Oregon, and they would wear long Johns to run around the neighborhood, and the neighbors were complaining that guys were running in their underwear, so Bowerman dyed them green, which I thought was so funny.”
Perhaps the most Bode items in the collection are the Scrimmage Pinnys, which are made from machine-washable mesh and embellished with an appliqué of a runner and decorated with a variety of pins and buttons. They will likely elicit an immediate emotional response from those who wore them while playing sports in middle school or high school, automatically embedding it with a memory and personal history—which is what Adams Bode Aujla has been after all along.
The collection will be available on April 18 on Bode.com and on May 1 on Snkrs and select Nike retailers.
