Bode to Return to Paris With Runway Show During Men’s Fashion Week
Emily is headed back to Paris — Emily Bode, that is.
After a pandemic-fueled break during which she focused on her domestic business and the opening of a Los Angeles flagship, the founder and designer of the Bode brand is planning to return to the official Paris menswear calendar in January.
More from WWD
Bode, who will celebrate the seventh anniversary of her heritage-inspired brand next summer, first made the jump across the pond in June 2019 and held her second show there right before the pandemic hit in February 2020.
“We came back to New York after the show and everyone was sick,” she recalled. It wasn’t long after that offices and stores closed and the world essentially shut down.
“Our plan was never to stop showing,” she said. “It just happened naturally.”
So while shows were canceled and international travel curtailed, Bode instead shifted her focus to the 3,200-square-foot flagship she opened on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in February.
“We decided to put all our energies into the West Coast market versus having a show,” she said.
And it paid off.
Bode said the store is performing well, as is her original location on Hester Street in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood.
“Our growth was really solid last year,” she said. “So now it’s important to grow as we have for the five years prior. So while we focused on our direct-to-consumer last year, next year, we’re going back to Paris.”
She said the European city is “top of mind right now.” And while the company’s largest direct-to-consumer market is in North America, “from a wholesale perspective, our largest volume is in Europe and the U.K.,” with retail customers such as Matchesfashion, Browns and Liberty in London, along with stores in Japan and Korea.
“Everyone frequents Paris for the shows,” she continued. “And while we’ve had great success with virtual appointments, we felt it was important to show again.” She characterized her line as “narrative-based” and, as a result, it benefits from a live presentation.
It also helps streamline the selling of the line when retailers and editors can shop and view the collection immediately after seeing the runway show in the same city.
Bode said that while she may decide to do a retail activation in New York during fashion week in February, there are no plans now to replicate the show in the States.
Bode, who won the 2019 award for Best Emerging Menswear Designer and the 2021 Menswear Designer of the Year award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America as well as the 2020 Karl Lagerfeld Award for Innovation from the Woolmark Co., has seen her business grow substantially over the past several years.
The company recently relocated from a cramped 2,000-square-foot space in Chinatown to a 10,000-square-foot manufacturing location in Brooklyn, and has been staffing up.
“We have quite a large in-house studio team now,” she said. That includes everyone from specialists in drawing and patternmaking to sewers and cutters who are working with her to “scale our one-of-a-kind business alongside the collection.”
Bode said as much as 40 percent of her business comes from one-offs that she and the team create from vintage quilts and repurposed fabrics. These are sold primarily through her own stores and website and she also creates a more-commercial collection with a similar aesthetic that is wholesaled.
Bode said that although retail is a successful channel for the company, there are no immediate plans to add more stores. But that may change.
“We’re constantly talking about it,” she said. “The L.A. store opened up the West Coast market for us in a way we didn’t know existed and completely changed our business.”
She said that because the California store is four times the size of her Hester Street unit, it is able to carry the entire collection. “New York is more of a jewel box of a store,” she said, “and the merchandise is ever evolving because we don’t have the same space.”
But the success of the West Coast store proved to the company that any future stores don’t have to fit into a particular mold.
“We’re now confident that all the stores can have a different feel and still be on brand,” she said. “They don’t need to be mirror images of each other.”
In the past, Bode has said that London is on her wish list for future retail expansion.
