Rodarte Has Got a Great Escape Route

If they get bored of making their line, Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte might do good business with a back-up career in magazines. The sisters have guest-designed the forthcoming issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, the fiction and art quarterly magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997. All-Story publishes a selection of short stories and one-act plays, guest-designed each issue by a major artist. Past guest-designers include Ed Ruscha and William Eggleston.

All-Story‘s fall issue is horror-themed, to commemorate the release of Coppola’s latest film, Twixt—a kind of  “gothic horror film,” said the magazine’s editor Michael Ray—starring Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning. “Our intention with this issue was to both kind of subvert and fulfill the expectations of what a horror issue would be,” he said, noting the Mulleavys’ own cinematic preferences.

Photos of pieces from past collections show the Mulleavy sisters’ unique ability to skirt the line between beautiful and spooky, complicated and masterfully ethereal. Ray says that while sometimes the guest designers work a lot with the issue’s stories—this month there are pieces by Karen Russell and Edgar Allan Poe, among others—the Rodarte graphic treatment is its own narrative through the magazine. “And I think that when we were thinking about a horror issue, we were trying to think of a designer who would be unexpected, but once you saw the issue, would seem totally obvious,” said Ray. “And I think that that’s what Kate and Laura achieved.”

Photo: Courtesy of Zoetrope and Rodarte; Autumn de Wilde for Zoetrope