Inside The “Vault”: Emily Adams Bode Partners With Microsofts on an AI-Powered Digital Quilt Archive

Photo: William Jess Laird

Technological is not the word that comes to mind when you think about Emily Adams Bode. Her clothes are refreshingly, charmingly un-digital in their essence, handcrafted from upcycled American antique quilts and textiles that often date back hundreds of years. It’s a rarefied fashion aesthetic that is pure and unfiltered and not necessarily intended to look great on Instagram. But lately Bode, who won the 2019 CFDA Fashion Award for Emerging Designer of the Year, has embraced her own digital savviness in an effort to scale her business and keep track of the precious quilts that she and her team source from around the country. Last night, the designer celebrated a new partnership with Microsofts she is calling the “Bode Vault.”

The custom AI-powered, design-to-production platform acts as a computerized library of quilts and patterns through which Bode and her team can attach historical dates and facts and catalogue how much of a certain material they have left. For example, Bode can take a photo of a quilt pattern—one that’s already been used for a Bode jacket, or one she’s just brought into the studio—and upload it into the system, which will then generate an approximate date and place of origin. This is the first technology of its kind to be applied to fashion in this way, and the hope is that more and more brands, namely those which use upcycled or historical materials, will be able to utilize the platform in order to help streamline and grow their businesses. The library was built with the help of the designer’s vast network of textile experts and historians, as well as American quilt dealers around the country.

“It’s not only for our inventory,” Bode explained last night. “It’s also for saving information, for archiving. The original intent was simply to help with the process of scaling the business, but it’s also to give more context to the clothes for our customers.” Currently, the Bode pieces you’ll find in her Hester Street shop are contextualized via hangtagss, which are handwritten with as much information about the garment as possible: where it was made, when it was made, and who made it. “It’s hard to pinpoint, especially with quilts, a real history,” Bode added. “The idea of making quilts is about collectsing pieces of fabric and scraps from your whole lifetime. So, let’s say a woman used fabric from her own shirts, her husband’s shirts, found fabrics, or used her grandmother or mother’s textiles. There are so many discrepancies, and one quilt can have patterns and fabrics from the 1800s to the 1940s and 1950s.” Bode hopes that this technology can eventually become public-facing and help those in the fashion and design industries who don’t have a reference library for fabrics and textiles. “We really want to build this out as something we can really use creatively, but also something that will help us in our day-to-day lives within our business,” she said.