Perfect Pairing: Rodarte + Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
Image courtesy of Todd Cole
“Fashion is an interesting medium to work in,” says Kate Mulleavy, one half of the duo who design Rodarte, the Los Angeles-based fashion line. “But part of what frustrates us are the limitations,” she adds. Kate and her younger sister Laura Mulleavy launched the creative endeavor in 2005, and have since collaborated on a variety of projects including photography books and ballet and opera costumes. Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin says that when she considers the works the Mulleavys have recently completed, she’s not surprised that the siblings have also wrapped a trilogy of short motion pictures with photographer Todd Cole. Philbin recently screened the three movies at the museum, and she calls the films “another expansion of their horizons.” The most recent project, This Must Be The Final Fantasy, debuted earlier this year and was just accepted by the American Film Institute’s Shorts Program at AFI Fest presented by Audi.
The Mulleavys and Cole created the trilogy of films that incorporate the Rodarte spring collections over the past three years. Though Laura says she and Kate would still want to be involved in the collaboration even if the Rodarte designs weren’t involved. “We wouldn’t care if none of our clothes were in the films,” Laura says. Kate sees the endeavor as a case of “making what needs to be made.” Cole, who also lives in L.A. and has directed all three shorts, says he and the siblings share the same film, book, and music references. “Collaborating with Kate and Laura is effortless. In life, that doesn’t happen that often,” Cole says.
The team made the first short, Aanteni, in 2010, and it premiered on LVMH’s Nowness. The apocalyptic film stars an anguished Guinevere van Seenus who is catapulted out of the atmosphere. The work was shot in one day in downtown L.A. and at SpaceX in Hawthorne. But as Laura notes, them team had hoped to shoot closer to their Pasadena home. “We really wanted to shoot at J.P.L. [Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory run by NASA].” Cole says the title is an ancient Mayan word that roughly translates to a scream for help. Van Seenus wears dresses that were burned and sanded by the Mulleavys. The looks are part of the spring ’10 Rodarte collection that Kate says was inspired by the idea of a person who was burned alive in the desert and transformed into a California condor. The film made the rounds on the festival circuit, and the creatives’ latest short, This Must Be The Only Fantasy will soon follow suit with its debute at AFI Fest.
Gamers are the subject of This Must Be The Only Fantasy, released by Creators Project, a partnership between Intel and Vice. “It’s medieval mixed with Nintendo,” says Kate, adding, “Laura was a Zelda fanatic in college.” Actress Sidney Williams makes her film debut alongside Elijah Wood (Trevor), playing Lora, a sword-wielding warrior who takes over Trevor’s master gamer throne after riding a unicorn to his Encino house. The mythical horse led Laura to become a producer of this latest short film. Explaining why she picked up a clipboard to keep the endeavor on schedule, Laura says, “I didn’t want to ride in the car to work and hear Kate bitch about not getting the unicorn into the sandbox.” Cole adds, “There was no movie if the unicorn wasn’t in the box.” The filmmakers are clearly drawn to this visual sequence, the point in the film when Williams takes up the warrior mantle.
Between the first and third films, the team shot The Curve of Forgotten Things (named after a Richard Brautigan poem) in 2011, at a house set amid a landscape of barren land and oil pumps in Baldwin Hills. The movie, starring Elle Fanning dressed in looks from the spring ’11 Rodarte collection (inspired by the interiors of Northern California homes the sisters remember from their childhood), also premiered on Nowness. Each film highlights different aspects of California that appeal to Cole and the Mulleavys. “The first film was centered around aeronautical engineering, the second has a Wild West aspect, and the third is set in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley,” says Laura. “Everything is linked back to where we grew up and what we see around us.” Cole sees the three movies as a series of sorts. “We like the idea of having three films. We always talk about it as a trilogy, maybe because Star Wars is a trilogy,” he says.
By Elizabeth Varnell
Pictured: Sidney Williams in a film still from This Must Be The Only Fantasy (2013), a Rodarte film by Todd Cole.
Courtesy of Todd Cole
