For her fall 2025 Bode collection, Emily Adams Bode Aujla looked to the life and work of the American composer Moose Charlap, who was best known for his work on Broadway’s 1954 Peter Pan musical, and the 1966 live-musical of Alice Through the Looking Glass that aired on NBC. It’s not an inspiration that comes out of thin air, but rather via a member of the designer’s extended family. Moose’s son Bill, a jazz pianist, is married to the designer’s husband Aaron Aujla’s aunt. It was through Bill, an expert and avid storyteller, that they began to uncover Moose’s world, and he’s also the reason why this season’s look book features miniature dolls instead of human people. “Bill had illustrated this world so nicely, the way he would talk about these scenes in Moose’s life,” said Aujla. “Emily and I were really drawn to building out those worlds physically so that we would contextualize the clothes.”
“Aaron and I talk about that a lot, we talk about what the concepts are going to be every season, and this one we wanted to wait until we could properly look at the scripts, review all the materials, meet with Bill, go look at all the family photos, look at the timeline…it’s a lot of work that goes into these collections,” Bode Aujla explained. “And we’d never told a very quintessential New York Story.”
The clothes draw from four different facets of Moose’s life—spending time at camp in the Poconos as a child, Central Park in New York City before or after a show, the Winter Garden Theater where Peter Pan debuted, and the painter Fernand Léger’s studio in Paris. Moose’s last, unfinished work was a musical, written with lyricist Eddie Lawrence, about the life of a painter—a kind of “proto-Sunday in the Park With George,” as Bill calls it.
It all sets the stage for the kind of beautiful clothes that Bode Aujla is known for. The chunky vintage-inspired knits, paper-thin and softer-than-soft souvenir T-shirts, and special pieces, like a flower-printed corduroy suit, a green patchworked suede jacket, or floral embroidered gray wool suit. While the menswear remains somewhat classic, the womenswear is prone to costume-inspired flights of fancy. Bode Aujla and her team imagined what Moose’s wife Sandy, an actor, might wear as a character in a movie or out to a glamorous night at the opera, so there are ball gowns with delicately embroidered lace bodices, beaded flapper dresses, and hand-appliquéd velvet gradient striped dresses that are a maximalist’s dream. All of them are just waiting for their red carpet moment, though a hammered-silk dress in a Legér-inspired print with fringe is certainly one of the highlights.
