Emily Bode Opened Her New York Store With a Casual Cocktail Party
“I wanted something that looked like Hieronymus Bosch,” Emily Adams Bode begins, gesturing across her new Hester Street store to a mural by artist Lukas Geronimas. The painting rests on a high shelf and depicts a misty outdoors scene with a low horizon; at the foreground, squat chestnut-colored animals are parading. Just below it, in a beautiful wooden frame, is a square photo of Bode’s father, nude save his boxer shorts, arms flexing. Across the store, in a matching frame, is her mother’s passport and stationary and a menu saved by her grandmother—all this compiled together by Bode and Green River Project, a design firm founded by her fiancé, Aaron Aujla, and Ben Bloomstein.
So the Bode store, an oasis of coffee-stained walls and moss-colored paint in the neon-lit, millennial pink Dimes Squarea of the Lower East Side is personal. You get that. It’s so emotively Bode that the bottles that rest in the back corner bar—mirrored for an old-timey, boozy effect—feature hand-painted labels by Aujla. You’d never notice that unless you really looked, Bode tells me with a smile.
Those little secrets, those hidden histories are the currency Bode trades in, upcycling antique, personal textiles into quilted chore coats and custom corduroys. It has vaulted her, over the span of three years, into menswear superstardom. Not only has she taken home a runner-up prize from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, but she has become New York’s menswear designer nonpareil. The proof isn’t just in the frenetic competition among the media for who gets to cover her and when and why—or that Harry Styles sported her cropped flannel on Saturday Night Live this past weekend—but in the fact that any event with the Bode name on it comes with the promise of highly crowded spaces.
And so all the casually handsome dudes and babes of New York piled into Bode’s new store on Monday evening. The fawning began immediately, with klatches of people forming to discuss the fountain, the lace shirts, the fresco on the ceiling—also by Geronimas—the boxes of Budweiser, all while peeling off their smart overcoats and piling up their umbrellas on a custom corduroy couch designed by Bode and Green River Project. The couch is beautiful, and Bode happily laughs at the pile of coats, stuffed animals, and people draped across it. “Those are all my high school friends,” she beams, referencing a shaggy-haired bunch entwined on the settee, who crane their necks and Bode-clad bodies and happily wave back at me. The couch, by the way, costs “like $20,000,” which is to say that the Bode lifestyle can be a bit pricey, even if she and Green River Project put together the entire store for less than six figures.
In the end, her clothes, her accessories, and a visit to her store is worth the cost. These are garments to toss on for nights of crashing and flaming out like you used to with your high school friends, or sitting knees up on a wooden stool for mornings of sipping Americanos with your adult ones. They’re clothes for your dad, for your mom, for your beloved. They’re clothes you’ll cherish—and can you put a price on memory?
Bode is open at 58 Hester Street, New York
Photo: BFA.com / Courtesy of Bode1/7Aaron Aujla, Emily Adams Bode, and Ben Bloomstein
Aaron Aujla, Emily Adams Bode, Ben Bloomsteen
Photo: BFA.com / Courtesy of Bode2/7Inside the Bode store
