BODE
Tiny garments, timeless echoes – a love letter in scale and stitch.
For Fall 2025, Bode delivers a quietly radical presentation that redefines what it means to tell a story through clothing. Titled The Expressionist: The Songbook of Moose Charlap, the collection honours the life and work of American composer Morris “Moose” Charlap through a deeply personal lens – one that unfolds not on the runway, but in miniature, across handmade dolls and artful stage sets.
Charlap, best known for co-writing the score to Peter Pan (1954), was a fixture of midcentury New York’s theatrical landscape. But it’s an unfinished project – an abandoned musical about a painter’s life in Paris – that becomes the conceptual nucleus of Bode’s latest offering. In typical Bode fashion, the collection doesn’t attempt to recreate the musical itself; instead, it interprets its emotional residue: the longing, the imagination, and the romanticism of a life shaped by both art and its absence.
What results is a collection that moves with quiet confidence through layered references. There are nods to Charlap’s formative years, garments that feel drawn from the wardrobes of post-war downtown creatives, and a palette that channels the soft melancholy of post-Impressionist canvases. Bode’s signature textures – rich velvets, hand-worked embroidery, vintage linens – serve as memory-triggers, grounding each look in time and feeling.
But the real shift here is scale. Rather than live models, each look is constructed at a 1:6 scale and styled on handmade dolls – inviting viewers into a more intimate, tactile experience. Four sets, designed by artist Lukas Geronimas, serve as the collection’s stage. Echoing midcentury Manhattan, the environments resemble dioramas of creative life: rehearsal rooms, cluttered studios, hushed apartments. They’re poetic in their detail and quietly cinematic in their atmosphere.
This is storytelling through absence – through what’s left unsaid. In turning to Charlap’s unfinished work, Bode reflects on what it means to leave something behind: a melody without lyrics, a costume without a stage, a painting never quite completed. These pieces – small in size but expansive in concept – speak to memory, legacy, and the deeply human desire to preserve what we love, even if it’s incomplete.
Bode has long stood at the intersection of craft and narrative, but The Expressionist feels especially resonant. It’s not just a collection – it’s a meditation. On the stories we inherit. The ones we lose. And the ones we stitch back together, thread by thread.
