L.A. Chic: A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion

First published in the UK in 2018 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2018 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Series: Urban Chic

Series ISSN: 2053-7077 (Print), 2053-7085 (Online)

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Alex Szumlas

Production manager: Tim Mitchell

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-934-7

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-936-1

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-935-4

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Dedicated to Erika Rummel and to the memory of Erwin Rummel, dear friends from whom we have learned so very much about both Los Angeles and chic.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: L.A. Chic: Between Rags and Riches

Urban chic: The becoming of the new Los Angeles

Chapter 1: Freeway vs Downtown

From suburban noir to downtown chic

From the suburbs to loft living, or: Neo-noir in gentrification-land: Veronica Mars – The Movie

Naomi Hirahara: Murder on Bamboo Lane and Grave on Grand Avenue

The subversive need for speed: Fast family, smart L.A. and muscle/cars in Furious 7

A gentler, softer, hipper Los Angeles for the twenty-first century?

Chapter 2: Santée Alley vs Santa Fe: Latinidad between Ramonaland and Latino Grit

Fuego: The new L.A. street style in Santée Alley

The Ramona mythology

Los Angeles and Santa Fe: A tale of two nostalgias

Fashioning latinidad

Chapter 3: L.A.’s Surf Chic: From Drop-Out Culture to Silicon Beach

Beaches, L.A. style

L.A. beaches become chic

Surfer culture

The original beachboys

Let’s go surfing now: Californian lifestyle in the 1950s

Surf globally, resist locally

Silicon surfers

Reading the beaches

Chapter 4: Bling and the Realities of Compton and Calabasas

The Bling Ring

Surfaces and seriality

Faciality

Umwelt – Calabasas

The ins and outs of Compton

Coda: GTA: City without angels

Chapter 5: L.A. Fashion in Museums

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM)

Other fashion-related exhibitions in L.A.

Chapter 6: Los Angelization à la Tom Ford: From American Gigolo to American Apparel

Doing a Gucci

Armani goes to Hollywood

Doing a Dov

Conclusion: Learning from Los Angeles, the Josephine Baker of Cities

Works Cited

Filmography

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Figure 0.1: Griffith Observatory in La La Land (Images © 2016 Black Label Media et al.).

Figure 0.2: Hermosa Beach Pier with lanterns, La La Land (Images © 2016 Black Label Media et al.).

Figure 0.3: Hermosa Beach Pier (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 0.4: Poster for Slimane’s final Saint Laurent show at the Palladium (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 0.5: American Gigolo (Images © 1980 Paramount Pictures).

Figure 0.6: Rags to Riches at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 0.7: Wall mural on the Angel City Brewery in the Arts District (photo: S. Ingram).

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1: Pop-up store in DTLA (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.2: Pavement ornament in the Fashion District (photo: K. Sark).

Figure 1.3: A new way of getting to know Los Angeles (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.4: Streetcar in The Grove shopping centre (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.5: Spatial apartheid I: The Bonaventure (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.6: Spatial apartheid II: Bunker Hill (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 1.7: Los Angeles City Hall (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 1.8: Miracle Mile between circa 1930 and circa 1945 (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 1.9: Bench near Disney Concert Hall (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 1.10: Brick Lofts, Arts District (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 1.11: L.A. River (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.12: Veronica Mars – The Movie: Arts District (Images © 2014 Warner Bros. Digital Distribution).

Figure 1.13: Neptune Marina in Marina del Rey (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.14: Arts District (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.15: Veronica Mars – The Movie: lines of sight (Images © 2014 Warner Bros. Digital Distribution).

Figure 1.16: Disney Concert Hall (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 1.17: Movie theatre in DTLA (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.18: dtla vets (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.19: Fast and Furious 6 (Images © 2013 Universal Pictures).

Figure 1.20: Fast and Furious 6 (Images © 2013 Universal Pictures).

Figure 1.21: Toretto home in Echo Park (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.22: Promotion of the Fast & Furious Ride at LAX (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 1.23: Gentrification by organic coffee and barbed wire in DTLA (photo: S. Ingram).

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1: Fuego (Images © 2013 Nowness ).

Figure 2.2: A piñata shop on East Olympic Boulevard (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 2.3: The L.A. fashion district welcomes you to Santée Alley (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 2.4: Taco truck next to the Ace Hotel (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 2.5: Shopping in Santée Alley (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 2.6: Calle Olvera (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 2.7: Rodeo Drive (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 2.8: The Grove (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 2.9: Fashion District (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 2.10: La Fonda Hotel, Santa Fe (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 2.11: Whole Foods supermarket, Santa Fe (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 2.12: One Santa Fe (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 2.13: Trailer for Los Angeles’s bid for the Olympics.

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1: Venice backstreets (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 3.2: Working out at Muscle Beach (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.3: Annette Kellerman (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 3.4: Gertrude Ederle (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 3.5: Bikini mural at Hermosa Beach (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.6: Marilyn Monroe postcard (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 3.7: Esther Williams, 17, posing in a swim suit during training in Los Angeles, California in 1939 ( Los Angeles Times photographic archive).

Figure 3.8: George Freeth memorialized in the International Surfing Museum, Huntington Beach (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.9: Gidget (Images © 1959 Columbia Pictures Corporation).

Figure 3.10: The Gidget beach boys (Images © 1959 Columbia Pictures Corporation).

Figure 3.11: Quiksilver boardshorts on display in the International Surfing Museum, Huntington Beach (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.12: Surfing as atmosphere in a bar on the Stubenring in Vienna (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.13: Quiksilver store, Huntington Beach (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.14: Patagonia headquarters and flagship store, Ventura (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.15: Ace Hotel lobby (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.16: Gehry’s Binoculars Building (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.17: Board meeting sculpture in the entry of the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 3.18: Bench on Abbot Kinney Boulevard (photo: S. Ingram).

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1: Welcome to Compton (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 4.2: Welcome to Calabasas (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 4.3: Surrounded by images in The Bling Ring (Images © 2013 American Zoetrope and NALA Films).

Figure 4.4: An Adventure in Excess poster (https://officialnickimooreforever.tumblr.com).

Figure 4.5: Straight Outta Compton costumes on display at the 24th Annual Art of Motion Picture Costume Design exhibition in 2016 in the FIDM Museum (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 4.6: Straight Outta FIDM tank-tops and bling necklaces in the FIDM Museum gift shop (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 4.7: The real Hotel Figueroa, under construction in 2016 (photo: S. Ingram).

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 5.2: The Broad (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 5.3: FIDM at night (photo: S. Ingram).

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1: Tom Ford (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 6.2: Giorgio Armani (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 6.3: Giorgio Armani boutique on Rodeo Drive (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 6.4: Dov Charney (Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 6.5: American Apparel factory on S. Alameda (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 6.6: American Apparel store on the Pacific Coast Highway 181 in Malibu (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 6.7: American Apparel ad in Santa Monica (photo: S. Ingram).

Chapter 7

Figure 7.1: Chris Burden’s Urban Light sculpture (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 7.2: Looking out over DTLA from the Ace Hotel roof 193 (photo: M. Reisenleitner).

Figure 7.3: Josephine Baker (Wikimedia Commons).

Acknowledgments

Los Angeles has always been a special place for us. It was our destination the first time we travelled together – a three-day road trip from Edmonton in 2000, and since then it has implicitly served as a kind of measuring rod that has helped us make sense of cities we have spent longer and shorter periods in: Hong Kong, Toronto, Vancouver, and Vienna, in particular. As the ideas for this book came together, we began to realize that we were not the only ones with much to learn from L.A., and we were buoyed time and again by the interest and encouragement we received as we began presenting the material that made its way into this book. Friends generously read drafts and made constructive suggestions, as did our extremely knowledgeable anonymous reviewers and the many colleagues and graduate students with whom we shared our ideas in fruitful exchanges over the past years. We are deeply thankful to you all, and to Intellect Books for continuing to tend our relationship and make possible the putting into practice of urban style as an intellectual pursuit.

Introduction

L.A. Chic: Between Rags and Riches

L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.

(Sorkin 8)

The glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand.

(Jameson 10)

City of stars, are you shining just for me, warble Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016), encapsulating the symbolic sparkle of the silver screen that the city embodies in the film: a glittering cityscape that the leads pretend not to be impressed by while gazing out over it from the Griffith Observatory (Figure 0.1). The latter site not only provides the setting that allows them to literally dance with the stars but also metonymically reinforces the city’s identity as a star-making machine, as do the rows of lights added to the Hermosa Beach pier for an equally faux-nostalgic dance scene (Figures 0.2 and 0.3). As we identify in this study, sparkle proves a common denominator across the various aesthetic strands that have come to be associated with Los Angeles, as it has gathered momentum as a fashion capital over the past several years. While Slavoj Žižek would have us pay attention to what the stars are blinding the cultural workers to and he would have us hum back the most stupid orthodox Marxist reply imaginable: No, I am not shining just for the petit-bourgeois ambitious individual that you are, I am also shining for the thousands of exploited precarious workers in Hollywood whom you can’t see and who will not succeed like you, to give them some hope! (Žižek), what we want viewers to appreciate is the significance and stylizing of locations and what they can tell us about the way Los Angeles’s image has been ever so subtly but nonetheless substantially changing into a bona fide, if new kind of fashion capital.

Already back in 2001, Jeremy Scott moved his eponymous label from Paris to L.A. Hedi Slimane followed in 2007 after leaving Dior Homme to reinvent himself for a time as a photographer and then moved the majority of Saint Laurent’s design studio to the city during his stint as the label’s creative director. Tom Ford similarly decamped to his Richard Neutra-designed spread in Bel-Air after parting ways with Gucci (Gell) and showcased his FW15 womenswear collection in the city during the weekend of the Academy Awards. A few months later, in April 2015, Burberry put on London to Los Angeles, which featured both its FW15 men’s and women’s collections at the Griffith Observatory with Union Jacks flying and a march of palace guards. Elton John, Mario Testino, David and Victoria Beckham, and their passel of children, sat front row to take it in (Schneier). Slimane followed by presenting his final menswear show with Saint Laurent, in February 2016, at the Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard (Figure 0.4), where a rock ’n’ roll celebrity crowd enjoyed both the fashion show and an aftershow of 11 bands ranging from Beck and Joan Jett to the rather less famous No Parents, along with the Sloths, who supported the Doors 50 years ago (Needham).¹ As Natalie Portman was quoted as commenting, East L.A. is all French now, […] When we’re in Paris, everyone is on their way to L.A. (Gell).

Figure 0.1: Griffith Observatory in La La Land (Images © 2016 Black Label Media et al.).

Figure 0.2: Hermosa Beach Pier with lanterns, La La Land (Images © 2016 Black Label Media et al.).

Figure 0.3: Hermosa Beach Pier (photo: S. Ingram).

Figure 0.4: Poster for Slimane’s final Saint Laurent show at the Palladium (photo: S. Ingram).

The presence of international designers has helped turn Los Angeles into the new black on account of its growing cool factor on the global fashion stage, its place as the next-generation crossroads of celebrity, art and youth culture and its importance as a gateway to the Asian luxury market (Moore). While Aaron Gell seemed a bit skeptical in reporting for T Magazine that,

[s]uddenly, though, something legitimately fashiony seems to be happening here. In the years since the hometown hero Rick Owens surfed off to Paris on a wave of gray cashmere and leather, the City That Sleeps Just Fine has undergone a style awakening […] After years in which the city’s style was typically represented by a starlet in terry cloth track pants and a matching hoodie clutching a Starbucks cup, Los Angeles is finally starting to be taken seriously as a design capital in its own right.

(Gell)

The September 2013 issue of Vogue more forcefully declared Los Angeles the coolest city on the planet (Moore), and the 6 January 2014 issue of GQ predicted that America’s next great city would be Downtown L.A. (B. Martin). As if to leave no room for doubt, a film released in 2016 revolved around the story of a beautiful teenager, played by Elle Fanning, who arrives in Los Angeles from a small town aspiring to be not an actress but a fashion model ( Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016). Clearly something was going on.

There is, of course, precedent to treat fashion-oriented developments in Los Angeles as just another wave. Mike Davis opens City of Quartz with the 1980s trend of intellectualism and bookishness in the form of celebrities buying armloads of ‘smart-looking eyeglasses’ (Davis 17), such as the ones Richard Gere dons when he gets behind the wheel of his Mercedes convertible in American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) (Figure 0.5). However, as Joe Day points out in his foreword to the 2009 edition of Reyner Banham’s classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Los Angeles no longer reads the way that pioneering ‘Los Angelists’ – to borrow Michael Sorkin’s term for L.A.’s early émigré enthusiasts such as Banham – read it in the 1970s (Day xvi). Nor does it read the way Davis began reading it in the 1980s, nor the way that the L.A. Schools of urban theory, geography, prose, art and architecture have read it since. Los Angeles may have outlived its mid-century role as the prototypical American City (Day xvii), and its days as the urban poster-child of postmodernism may be behind it, but the city has remained a barometer. Andrew Deener likes the metaphor of a prismatic metropolis […] that reflects and differentiates the spectrum of colors out of a stream of light. For him, Los Angeles captures and refracts the complex racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic changes in the United States and positions them in relation to one another throughout its vast landscape (Deener 9). While one could also figure the city as a catalytic converter, reflecting its current attempts to repurpose itself as an engine of user-friendly urban growth, given the proximity of the San Andreas Fault and the fact that earthquakes are part and parcel of the city’s everyday as much as of its apocalyptic imaginary, we find it more locationally apposite to approach L.A. as a cultural seismograph, implacably tracking the mutations of a modernity that grows ever later.

Figure 0.5: American Gigolo (Images © 1980 Paramount Pictures).

For much of its history, Los Angeles has tended to be conflated with the larger state of California and the incessant boosterism that has long accompanied its image (Kaplan 28). This boosterism has been the subject of both exhaustive, eloquent admiration, as in the case of California’s most important historian, the late Kevin Starr, and equally exhaustive and eloquent critique, such as that of Mike Davis, for whom the Boosters, together with the Noirs, the Mercenaries, the Exiles and the Sorcerers, are collectivized interventions by intellectuals in the culture formation of Los Angeles (22–23). If one of the most often repeated quotations about California is Wallace Stegner’s 1959 observation that California is America, only more so (Kaplan 28), then Los Angeles is California, only more so.

Paeans have long been sung to the Golden State’s independent spirit and sense of innovation. Henry Dreyfuss, an industrial designer who moved from New York to Pasadena in 1944, claimed admiringly that [o]n the Pacific Coast there are fewer shackles on tradition. There is an unslackening development of new thought. There is a decided willingness to take a chance on new ideas (quoted in Kaplan 28). However, L.A. is not so much California as Southern California, an imaginary realm as well as the built environment Banham and others have analysed. Bordered by ocean on one side and desert on the other, it is connected by a once iconic freeway system that now strikes critics as quaint, haggard and Lilliputian (Day xix), and characterized by a distinctive ethos that contrasts notably with both Northern California, San Francisco and the Bay Area on the one hand, and with New York and the East Coast on the other. We explore the former contrast in our chapter on Silicon Beach, picking up on the rivalry that is figured in Sandow Birk’s 2003 mockumentary In Smog and Thunder as an outright war.² The stylistic contrast with New York and the East Coast is something that repeatedly provokes comment, especially from those writing in the East Coast press:

Southern California, after all, is the place that turned comfort into a spiritual doctrine, the place you went to discard your clothes and run barefoot into the surf. New York dresses up, L.A. dresses down. New York is tailored, L.A. is flowy. Its official uniform might as well be the supersoft T-shirt and jeans, followed closely by the maxi dress. Such apparel might come off as a tad low-key sashaying down a runway, but it’s a look.

(Gell)

As we know from Banham, in order to understand the city, one must come to terms with its language: namely, movement: the city will never be understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life (Banham, Architecture 5). Of interest to us are the stylistic implications of this movement and its entwining in the city’s fashion system.

L.A.’s stylistic register has tended to be dominated by Hollywood, which is what the industry usually refers to in Los Angeles, not the garment, textile or apparel industries. Yet one of the mottos associated with the city that was used to advertise Becoming L.A., the new permanent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, which opened in July 2013 to mark the museum’s centenary, reveals how inextricably linked the two are (Figure 0.6).

Figure 0.6: Rags to Riches at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (photo: S. Ingram).

Rags to Riches both encapsulates the celluloid dreams Los Angeles has come to stand for and makes explicit the central role that fashion has played in those dreams. As Rabine and Kaiser point out, not only did L.A.’s apparel industry emerge […] in the 1920s in tandem with Hollywood’s film industry (237), but the endemic labour abuses that form the invisible underside of fashion glamour have contributed substantially to the class tensions which continue to tear at the city’s urban fabric (235). Los Angeles has long been home to both rags and riches, earning it the reputation of being a cold and impersonal town full of extremes – South Central on one side and Bel Air on the other (London). Indeed, riots – most notably between zoot suit-wearing Latinos and white sailors and marines in 1943; between marginalized groups such as African Americans and the LAPD in Watts in 1965; and after the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial in 1992 – have resulted from the radical class disparities that are one of the city’s hallmarks and that fashion is a conspicuous symptom and marker of. A city where the industry produces cinematic fashion fantasies for the entire world, Los Angeles is also home to the most important centre of garment production in the country (Rabine and Kaiser 235), recasting the city’s historical texture as both America’s entertainment and sweatshop capital (Spence). According to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, apparel manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in Los Angeles County (Sherman, LA Confidence). The Garment Worker Center/El Centro de Trabajadores de Costura, a not-for-profit organization that [was founded in 2001 and] advocates for fair labor practices in the clothing industry, draws attention to the fact that in 2007 Los Angeles was home to more than 100,000 garment workers, less than 1% of whom are unionized (Spence). While the discovery in 1996 of Thai garment workers who were kept behind barbed wire in an El Monte slave labor camp (Kurashige 290) led to the strongest anti-sweatshop bill in the nation being passed in California in 1999, making the profitable retail corporations responsible for guaranteeing minimum and overtime rates to workers in contracted and subcontracted factories, those corporations have been able for the most part to rely on the laxity of Labor Department enforcement as well as new laws that have weakened the original bill (Rabine and Kaiser 237).

None of this contradicts Mike Davis’s assessment of the city in City of Quartz as a stand-in for capitalism in general (18). On the contrary, it is to be expected that as the nature of capitalism changes, so too will Los Angeles. Not only has Los Angeles become the second largest city of Mexican inhabitants after Mexico City itself (Rabine and Kaiser 237) and the second biggest Thai, Salvadoran, and Korean city in the world (London), its economy is one of the world’s largest, ranking seventeenth in the world in 2016, ahead of the Netherlands and below Mexico (List of Countries by Projected GDP 2016). According to the US Census Bureau, the city’s metropolitan area boasted a GDP of more than $825 billion, while according to the 2014 US Wealth Report released by Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management, there were 330,000 high net worth individuals in the city, worth a total of $1.2 trillion (Sherman, LA Confidence).

As such, Los Angeles