Within the metaverse-hopping style mashup All the pieces In all places All at As soon as—these days often called the film that swept the 2023 Oscars, greatest image included—an overwhelmed laundromat proprietor (Michelle Yeoh) finds herself pressed into responsibility throughout an elevator trip to an IRS appointment. The mission, she learns, is to save lots of the world, and it’ll contain household and fantasy, the mundane and the piercingly lovely, all whereas she attracts on talent units she didn’t even notice have been at her fingertips.
For Shirley Kurata, the movie’s Oscar-nominated costume designer and an insider-favorite stylist working throughout trend and music, the stakes weren’t precisely as excessive in 2006, when she received a last-minute entreaty to hop a airplane and assist an upstart trend label with its very first runway present. However with out that leap of religion, Rodarte as we all know it—a dreamscape enterprise, ever-transporting 17 years on—merely wouldn’t be the identical.
“Actually, it’s actually exhausting for me to consider a time the place she hasn’t been a artistic collaborator, a greatest pal, a creative accomplice,” says Rodarte cofounder Kate Mulleavy, describing Kurata’s presence as “an extension of sisterhood.” (It was the filmmaker and photographer Autumn de Wilde who performed matchmaker, roping in Kurata for that first present; the stylist has labored on their runways and lookbooks, alongside Ashley Furnival, ever since.) Kate is talking over Zoom from label’s nondescript studio in downtown Los Angeles. Rodarte’s different half, Laura Mulleavy (older by a yr), is asking from the automotive. Kurata, in her trademark owlish glasses, has joined from her dwelling within the Los Feliz–Franklin Hills space. On the wall behind her, a looping print in an orange-to-brown gradient nods to her ’60s fascination. She’s sporting a classic dolman-sleeve shirt with a repeating grid of Mickey Mouse faces—becoming for a trio of Southern California natives, whose sense of place typically weaves into their work. (Rodarte’s fall 2019 present occurred amid the uncommon vegetation on the Huntington Library, of their hometown of Pasadena, whereas the costume designer hit up LA’s Chinatown to supply seniors-appropriate garments for EEAAO.) “It’s reversible, so the opposite facet is one huge Mickey Mouse,” Kurata explains. However throughout an awards season in thrall to The Daniels’ tackle alter-egos, a number of Mickeys is the best way to go.
We’re talking days earlier than the Oscars, when Kurata will take the carpet in a diaphanous, beaded customized Rodarte look—the uncommon event when a behind-the-scenes expertise will get a second within the highlight. “It appears like we’re celebrating costume design once we get to do that,” Laura says. (The sisters’ reverence for the sphere is earned: They created a number of darkly beautiful seems for Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning flip in Black Swan.) “The movie is simply unbelievable world-building,” Kate provides, “and Shirley was an incredible a part of that.”
