News: Catherine Boddy Socks Sing the CanCan!

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

You have installed yourself at a bar, legs wide apart, hanging off your seat—relishing in your glycerin salt clouds and puffing your alt., you are the flaneur, distracting yourself from the approaching Auckland traversing winter. $6 bubbles, jazz imploding out the artifice, you roll up your pants and tuck them into your socks. In fact, you decide to kick your legs up on the table. Any walker passer will see you may as well be Jane Avril from a Lautrec poster. Why? Because you are liberated in your Catherine Boddy socks, building castles in the air.

Catherine Boddy, the 22-year-old self-made designer, has been circling her treasured frocks and accessories throughout the Auckland scene for the past few years. I remember walking into Search and Destroy on Ponsonby Road, in our first lockdown, needing something sophisticated to dress up in (for gram posts only). Fixated on the atmospheres habituated from studying Lautrec’s work in a modernist paper, I espied hanging off a Margiela book so delicately, my dream gloves, long, black, merino, with a slit for the pointer and thumb so I was always iPhone accessible. These were my first Boddy Part purchase and one of my most treasured. I was ready to be Eva Green in my towel, in my boudoir, arm thermale’d with any tank-top combo that winter.

That’s what Catherine does. She creates accessories that are both versatile and functional—a fantasy. Now, our arms get to be dazzled in her essence, but our legs become the show. “I was so bored by socks!” Catherine avows. “I wanted to create a sock that was like, so much more than a sock, something substantial. I feel like they're almost a stocking or tight, they cover so much of the body.  There are cool ones out there though of course, but so much of the time, they lose their practicality as soon as they're cool. Where are all the cool socks that still keep you really warm and are amazing quality and won't break in two wears because they're like sheer with 500 cutouts or something? Plus you can hold stuff in the ribbons and don't need to carry a bag! I wanted to make something that people do need and don't feel wasteful buying, a necessity, but is so exciting!”

Her new socks will transform any fit into a Moulin Rogue dream, sensuous, and farceur-like. The conventional colours, royally paired in ballet flats or open toe heels, juxtapose and intersect within the patterns of an old villa's paisley carpet, or the legs of the tables at Peach Pit; the hosiery will not go unnoticed.

Catherine Boddy socks are available via her newly launched website, CATHERINEBODDY.CLUB

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

Catherine Boddy socks, photographed by Constance McDonald

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