1. rodarte; There is fashion life in L.A. beyond jeans.

Byline: Mark Holgate

A few days after their sophomore presentation in New York, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, a.k.a. Rodarte, a.k.a. the most interesting young label to have emerged from Los Angeles in a long, long time, decided to visit the American Museum of Natural History. Nature, you see, was the main inspiration of their spring 2006 collection-trees and bark formations in particular.

The Mulleavys loved the displays of Zoroastrian robes, and the fur robes from the Ainu tribe of Japan, but it was a tableau of taxidermied woodland animals that really tickled them. "We were once asked," recalls Laura, 25, " 'Where do you imagine your clothes being worn?' And we said that we have this fantasy of a woman living in a log cabin in the woods, and she leaves one of our dresses on a chair, and it gets bleached in the sun." "And the dress would have a hidden pocket for spiders," says her sister, Kate, 26. "Yes!" agrees Laura. "We asked our friend Jen, who's a conservator, to wear some of our clothes on one of her digs," says Laura. "But she wouldn't do it," adds Kate. "She wanted to wear khakis, like everyone else."

Friend Jen probably had the right idea. Though Rodarte's clothes are exquisitely wearable, they're not exactly built for digging. Next spring's tightly edited, sharply focused collection of sixteen looks includes a yellow silk dress adorned with a line of Lady Amherst pheasant feathers, a black silk sunburst-pleat dress with diamond panels, and a pearl-gray one-shouldered cocktail dress made from layers of organza, taffeta, and shantung woven together, which took weeks of work to perfect. What they call the "sculptural qualities of bark" were translated into rows of undulating ruffles; "trees" were simply interpreted as a longer line (redolent of the Edwardian/thirties silhouette that's everywhere now).

So how did two young Californian bluestockings who have no formal fashion training end up producing some of the prettiest, and most polished, new looks? The answer, apparently, is nature and nurture. "We always loved fashion-we grew up sketching clothes," says Kate. ...