Outsider Art

Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind the fashion brand Rodarte, are strolling the grounds of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif., finishing each other’s sentences and often speaking in unison. They discuss the delicacies of a certain Victorian rose. They agree that the stem of an antique lightbulb inside the library reminds them of a carousel. They recall childhood trips to the Huntington estate to visit their maternal grandmother, who worked there as a docent.

What they don’t talk about is fashion. Kate, 33, and Laura, 31, are dressed down in jeans and matching navy moccasins; Kate wears a Three Stooges T-shirt under a Kurt Cobain–ish fuzzy cardigan. An eavesdropper might guess them to be eager Ph.D. candidates in plant sciences–in fact, their father is a botanist who specializes in fungi–not internationally acclaimed fashion designers whose celebrity fans include First Lady Michelle Obama, actress Natalie Portman and Star Wars creator George Lucas (who attended Rodarte’s New York Fashion Week show in February). Now the sisters are designing the dramatic, couture-like costumes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s star-studded production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting and with sets by Frank Gehry. It premieres May 18 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In the opening act, the womanizing title character, played by renowned baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, murders a man, whose ghost later drags him to hell. This is right up the Mulleavys’ street. Don Giovanni “is a big horror story, which is why it’s cool,” says Laura, who with Kate once watched nothing but Japanese, Korean and Italian horror movies for an entire year. “There’s a supernatural element. There’s fanaticism.” There’s also a family connection of sorts: the same late grandmother who guided visitors around the Huntington estate had a brief career as an opera singer. (Her last name–their mother’s maiden name–was Rodart; the designers added the e.)

Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour recommended the Mulleavys for the Don Giovanni gig. “They have a theatrical, couture approach to their work and often weave a narrative into their runway ‘stories,’ which made me think how intriguing it would be for them to work for the stage,” she said in an e-mail to TIME. Wintour has known the Mulleavys since 2005, shortly after the sisters had cold-pitched their debut line to magazine editors in New York City using paper dolls fitted with miniature versions of the clothes, which were made on their parents’ kitchen table in California. The collection almost immediately established the Mulleavys as meticulous craftswomen with a deep romantic streak, more interested in form and floating-on-air fantasy than functionality.

On that fateful trip, “we were staying in a small East Village apartment, and we’d never really had an urban experience like that,” Kate says. “It was just me and Laura with this box of clothes–“

“We did not even want to go outside,” Laura says, interrupting. “We were scared to leave!”

But Rodarte–and its ultra-feminine, ethereal yet dark-edged aesthetic–was now an open secret. Within days, the agenda-setting trade publication Women’s Wear Daily asked for an interview; the sisters landed on its Feb. 3, 2005, cover. Vogue came calling promptly afterward. Overnight, a pair of designers with little formal training and no industry connections had become the buzz of the New York fashion scene. “It was life-changing for us,” Kate says. “Anna could tell that what we were doing was very personal, and she told us to keep it that way. Personal is the heart and soul of what Laura and I do, and everything we’ve done since has come from that viewpoint.”

Personal includes California, where the Mulleavys have lived all their lives. The only children of a mycologist father and artist mother, they were raised in Aptos, not far from Monterey Bay, and later Pasadena; at the University of California, Berkeley, where both dropped out of a costume-design class, Kate studied art history and Laura literature.

As elementary-school students, they donated their milk money to save-the-California-condor campaigns at school. Years later, Rodarte presented its spring 2010 “condor couture” show, inspired by the endangered bird; it featured tethered black-and-umber dresses made of a mosaic of cheesecloth, leather and plastic strips that had been sandpapered, burned or shredded by the sisters themselves. The California redwood provided a theme for spring 2011, with trousers that evoked tree trunks and tailored brown shifts that mimicked wood paneling.

“California has hugely influenced everything we do,” says Kate. Laura finishes the thought: “You can find bits of California in every collection we’ve done, from our very first runway show.”

It’s been seven astonishingly busy years since that first runway show, but the Mulleavys still live at home with their parents in Pasadena. Less than two years apart in age, they act and speak like invisibly conjoined twins. They share an e-mail address; they tell the same stories verbatim. After they were seated separately at an industry dinner, they met up afterward to discover that they’d both talked at length about the Apollo space program with their respective seatmates. They don’t travel apart anymore, because otherwise they’d be on the phone with each other all the time, to the great annoyance of their friends. Asked to name some differences between them, they’re mostly stumped. Laura drives; Kate doesn’t. Laura has a BlackBerry; Kate uses an iPhone.

If the Mulleavys have an extraordinary bond, it’s not an insular one–they love collaboration. On the 2010 psychodrama Black Swan, the Mulleavys worked with its star, Portman, who is a vegan, to create lush illusions of leather and feathers for her character’s ballet costumes using non-animal-based products. “There was an incredible amount of craftsmanship that went into these costumes,” says Portman, who collected her Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan in a violet Rodarte dress. “As soon as you put them on, you felt like a different character.”

The Mulleavys likewise adored working alongside Frank Gehry, architecture’s elder statesman, in designing the costumes for Don Giovanni, including Giovanni’s hand-painted marble-finish armor and Donna Elvira’s sensational black gown layered with metals, Swarovski crystals and sheets of organza. “You’re meeting an iconic artist, for one thing,” Kate says, “and on the flip side, you’re meeting a warm, kind person who makes you laugh.”

“I always know our meetings with Frank are going to last four hours, and we’ll talk about the opera for like 10 minutes,” Laura says. “Even when we’re talking about something that will ultimately be concrete, like a prop, the dialogue is abstract, and we know it’s always evolving and changing. We work that way. Frank works that way.”

In addition to their forays into film and stage work, the Mulleavy sisters have guest-edited Lula magazine and Zoetrope: All-Story, the quarterly founded by director Francis Ford Coppola. Last fall, the Mulleavys released their first monograph in collaboration with esteemed photographers Catherine Opie and Alec Soth, pairing images of Rodarte designs with California landscapes. Rodarte has also expanded commercially, with limited-edition collections for Gap and Target as well as a line for international boutique Opening Ceremony.

Despite their ample industry credibility and increasing commercial power, in some senses the women of Rodarte remain fashion-world outsiders. Shy and unpretentious, they prefer national parks to the New York City party circuit. They’ve literally stayed close to home, where they’ve kept their company small and independent. They still craft every garment they send out on the runway by hand.

“We made a conscious decision from the beginning that we weren’t going to take Rodarte in the first four or five years and expand it into all different areas,” Kate says. “It takes time to understand who you are in clothing. I don’t pretend to know it overnight.”

Patience is a lesson they internalized with their debut New York Fashion Week collection in 2005. As they lined up the models backstage, Kate couldn’t stop thinking about one yellow column dress with hand-draped flowers. “I felt like this was a really important piece for us,” Kate says. “I kept telling Laura that there was something about the piece that was capturing who we are.”

That gown–and the whole collection–was warmly received by critics, though one prominent reviewer reduced the collection to just a line of pretty dresses. “I thought, That is not the point of what I’m doing,” Kate says. “The reason I wasn’t deterred is because Laura and I believed intrinsically in what we do.” In 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute acquired that sleeveless gown for its permanent collection. “The things that define us didn’t seem like decisions at the time,” Laura says. “It’s just what you do, and what you do is part of who you are.”

FOR MORE FROM TIME’S INTERVIEW WITH THE RODARTE TEAM, GO TO time.com/rodarte