Labors of Love: An Unlikely Parallel Between Rural Vermont and Luxury Fashion

By Sierra Cameron

Cover image by Sierra Cameron

Originally a menswear couture brand established in 2016, Emily Adams Bode Aiuja’s eponymous label, Bode, has become a standout example of gender fluid fashion that maintains a strong sense of timelessness. Scroll through their website and you’ll see warm hues of vintage graphics and quilt-like textures —just about as modern as nostalgia gets. Call it “farm-to-table” or “grandpa-chic,” the Bode vibe isn’t easy to distill into words, but that's precisely what makes it so captivating. Featured in an article from New York Magazine, fashion writer Rachel Tashjian describes Bode as “sincere” and “tender” and writes that it “emphasizes family and friendship and grace.” In this sense, Bode is the Vermont of luxury fashion.

Vermont is America’s tender pull back to basics. It’s the ping! ping! of maple sap hitting an aluminum bucket and the smell of fertilizer buried in your nose. The “Green Mountain State” calls visitors and residents alike to be humble and still as the roads stretch and the fields sprawl. Vermonters value tradition and connectedness across generations, towns, and streets. It’s a place of simple pleasures. 

Aside from aesthetic similarities, both Vermont and Bode are richly layered labors of love. Emily Adams Bode Aiuja started collecting fabrics from vintage dealers long before her brand carved a space for itself in the luxury fashion industry. An i-D article notes that her curation process and relationships with dealers prioritize “tradition, technique, and trust.” Bode Aiuja told the author of this article, “Creating a space to hold stories is so important. Oral histories, sound tidbits, maps. Taking the time to record: ‘This quilt was made from this. It was found at this place. This color was popular at the time it was created, because of these reasons.’ So much is being lost and forgotten.” There is a careful attention to detail in Bode’s pieces. The Vermont landscape is rich in detail, but it takes a certain type of person to unravel it all. Through his poetry, Robert Frost proves himself to be one such individual. 

In a New York Times article titled “Robert Frost’s Vermont,” author Robert D. Kaplan writes of Frost, “Because Frost was a farmer first, poet second (he owned five farms, all in Vermont), his poems are more than rooted in the state's landscape, they are the landscape: its stony and frugal soil, its sculptured, shimmering green glens bespeaking a timeless and mystical perfection, and its early winter melancholies. Frost's words, like sharpened farm implements, sifted meaning from this both severe and tender physical reality.” Not just anywhere can be described as “bespeaking a timeless and mystical perfection” — that description is rightfully reserved for the Green Mountain State… but is notably appropriate for Bode too.