Rodarte Mines The Mike Mills Archive At LA Art Weekend

Like many great creatives, Mike Mills’ work is more recognizable to most people than his name. He’s created fabrics and graphics used by Marc Jacobs, Susan Cianciolo, and Cosmic Wonder. He’s made music videos for Blonde Redhead and Air. His work has graced album covers (Sonic Youth), concert tees (Beastie Boys), book jackets (Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You) and movie screens (Thumbsucker). Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy were on hand to interview Mills after the screening of his film work at LA Art Weekend, treating the audience to a new perspective on his seemingly endless body of work.

It wasn’t just the trio’s longtime friendship that made this pairing of interviewers and subject so fitting. Just as Mills refuses to be pigeonholed as a graphic designer or a filmmaker or an artist, the Mulleavy sisters draw more from culture and history than from the fashion world. Understandably, much of the conversation revolved around the crossing of genres that occurs in just about every piece of Mills’ work.

Laura specifically brought up his 1998 music video for Air’s “All I Need,” which layered a documentary about two skateboarders’ love story over the track. “Reusing a format has always been exciting to me,” explained Mills. “I always want to add value in a place you don’t expect, like putting a documentary inside a music video.” The trio also talked about their childhoods in suburban SoCal, where Mills’ eyes were first opened to skate culture. “Everytime I try to do something ‘punk’—by which I mean messing with your expectations—it came from my skateboarding years,” he admitted.

Whether making a documentary about anti-depressants in Japan (Does Your Soul Have a Cold? or a self-portrait compiled from all the Mike Mills photos in a Google Images search, the designer/artist/director says his work is “all the same attempt to participate in pop culture in a way that’s personal and real.”

We could argue that the same could be said of Rodarte, so we were pleased when an audience member asked if the interviewer/interviewee roles would one day be reversed. While Mills clearly has the utmost respect for Rodarte—saying “Their work feels like it’s out of this time—how do young women from now make those dresses?”—the Mulleavys were less convinced. “We make clothes, but would never be able to come up here and talk about fashion,” said Kate. “I don’t know what I would say about it.”

For more information on Mills, see www.mikemillsweb.com.

—Erin Magner