It’s rare that a fashion exhibition opens in the District, and when traveling fashion-house survey shows make the museum rounds, they don’t typically make a D.C. stop. Lovers of history and apparel flock to the National Museum of American History’s display of dresses worn by America’s first ladies. And there have been other one-off shows, like Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens’ 2015 showcase of founder Marjorie Merriweather Post’s wardrobe.

“There’s not really a space in D.C., at least not up until this point, that has brought contemporary cutting-edge fashion into the museum realm the way it’s been done, say, in New York,” says Virginia Treanor, associate curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

On Saturday, an exhibition of Los Angeles fashion label Rodarte opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, marking the first fashion show for the museum and a rarity in the D.C. museum world.

“They are the artists of the fashion design world,” says guest curator Jill D’Alessandro, who is also the curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Their work is really conceptually driven, they are using nontraditional techniques in costume-making, particularly in their early careers. So it makes sense if you are going to introduce this to your audience, to pick designers that are really so closely aligned to the art world.”

Established by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy when they were in their twenties, the fashion label Rodarte is now 27 seasons deep. In September, the duo showed their latest collection at New York Fashion Week after a two-year absence from the week-long festival where they made their debut back in 2005. “No one is better at provoking daydreams than Rodarte—it’s impossible to watch one of their shows without fantasizing about the kind of life these looks demand, a life of endless decadence and romance,” wrote Maya Singer in Vogue about the recent show.

The curators for the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition are careful not to call Rodarte a retrospective, since the 13-year-old brand is still in its infancy, and the founders themselves are only now in their late thirties. The show includes 94 looks covering about a dozen of the brand’s seasons, from the subtle florals in Fall/Winter 2006 to the more overt flowers in Spring/Summer 2018, showcasing the label’s ruffled-and-tough aesthetic off the runway.

At eye-level in the exhibit, the Mulleavys’ emphasis on detail is on full display. Horror film-inspired silk tulle dresses from Fall/Winter 2008 are dyed red and trimmed with matching Swarovski crystals. Strips of embossed, braided, smocked, and pin-tucked leather form a jacket from Spring/Summer 2010, and a net pantsuit-and-cape set from Spring/Summer 2018 is dotted with sequined flowers. There’s even a Death Star dress: Five gowns from Fall/Winter 2014 are printed with characters and images from Star Wars.

Rodarte’s otherworldliness extends beyond clothing and accessories into film. The Mulleavy sisters wrote and directed last year’s feature-length film Woodshock starring Kirsten Dunst, and also designed the costumes for 2010’s Black Swan starring Natalie Portman.

Designed by Rafael de Cárdenas of Architecture at Large, the exhibition showcases the clothes in clusters: Magical Beautiful Horror, Northern California Roadmap, and the Garden, to name a few. While the collection looks are displayed on mannequins, some colored to match the clothes, the costumes from Woodshock and Black Swan hang on invisible mounts. The viewer’s journey throughout the exhibit is deliberately scattered.

“What we’re really looking at is a lot of pivotal collections and pivotal statement pieces,” D’Alessandro says. “We’re not trying to examine the arc of their career because there isn’t an arc to examine yet.”

Rodarte is on view through February 10, 2019 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Open 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and noon–5 p.m. on Sundays. Museum admission is $10 for adults, $8 for students and visitors 65 and over, and free to visitors 18 and under.