What's the fashion capital of the U.S.?
Plus new bags, slappers for holiday parties and beyond & more
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What’s America’s fashion capital? You don’t need to read this recent study into the ongoing decline of the New York garment industry to sense that the city’s heat when it comes to slapper-craft has diminished relative to past glories.
There’s still Mach 6+ talent in town, of course, and New Yorkers remain the country’s best-dressed population per capita, 2nd only to the high-level-swag elders we see at the grocery here in Oakland. But lately I (Erin) have been wondering if the beating heart of clothing design and manufacture — especially when it comes to the small makers we focus on here — has moved west, like so many New Yorkers, to Los Angeles. California is, after all, America’s largest manufacturing hub, and the L.A. Fashion District is responsible for something like 80% of nationwide garment production. (This has been thanks in no small part to the starvation wages of “piece rate” labor, which big companies love, and which California technically illegalized in 2021, but this great Derek Guy piece at The Nation suggests that enforcement is highly inconsistent, and illustrates how “Made in USA” isn’t a panacea.)
Over the past few years, L.A. has seen a renaissance, in particular, of top-notch indie labels. Off the dome I can rattle off ~20 lines I f**k with heavy who produce their clothes entirely, or at least in part, in Los Angeles. With the looming threat of import tariffs, you could see that list growing… (Mine is down below, let me know who I’m blanking on.)
To be clear: A mere 3% of the garments worn in the U.S. are produced domestically. And the designers I’m most interested in are making beautiful things on a small, manageable scale. Producing in L.A., near where they live and work, helps make that possible: proximity to their factories and suppliers allows them to cut down on costs and dial in the execution of their visions that much more granularly… most pick up samples and production runs themselves.
All of which was in my mind the other day when I visited L.A. to link and build with several designers down there I admire. Join me as I:
Pop into their studios and get the intel on new gems
Visit a major L.A. plug for deadstock fabrics and trimmings so dope that I half-wonder why any label opts to use new fabric at all
Shop the city’s best new vintage store of 2024, with clothes for men & women, located in a heavily trafficked neighborhood and yet somehow slept-on
Prove that washing your clothes really is cool again
And more !
The L.A. thread of our Global Intel Travel Chat Room is here.
Let’s get to it —
Can I get ergonomic for a quick sec? I have beef with a lot of the au courant baguette bags. They do not sit naturally on the body — you have to pop out your elbow to accommodate the bulge, or hold it in front of you with both hands like a trick-or-treater begging for candy…
My first stop in L.A. — after that beautifully brief Oakland-to-Burbank hour in the sky — was downtown’s Are Studio, whose bags are designed with actual bodies in mind! Their Bow bag is my current daily driver, so I was excited to meet founder/designer Cecilia Bordarampe. She started Are in 2012 when she couldn’t find any bags she liked, and tried making one herself. At first she ran the line while working full-time as a museum curator and has remained small. Are is a ~2 person labor-of-love type operation that benefits from having her mom, who’d “do anything to help,” Cecilia told me, live nearby. Are’s factory is literally down the street from the design studio, which allows her to communicate ideas to sewers without necessarily needing to make tech packs.
Cecilia doesn’t have a design background, but I’m impressed by the elegant resolution of her forms. The ladylike Clara bag (pictured below top left), is one of my favorites, in part because it has a flat strap and lean profile that help it nestle onto the shoulder and stay put. Dead-on it looks like a triangle whose points have been sanded off. From the side, the strap’s center seam appears to split open to form the gusset (as seen below bottom left).
Other intel from Are:
Their excellent unlined organic-cotton canvas totes (finished on the interior with French seams) were restocked earlier this week. This deceptively simple schlepper comes in three sizes, with a square bottom and sets of both long and short straps, to carry it over the shoulder or in-hand.
A bag collaboration with Bill McNicol of William Frederick — a Cleveland menswear line that’s low-key been making sick womenswear, which I wrote about here — will be released next fall, likely iterating on the square tote, and cut from a sumi-dyed paper-linen canvas.
And, if you are looking for a 🪩 party clutch 🪩, Cecilia makes chic leather pouches, also in 3 sizes. I have a small black one and, for a recent holiday party, I turned it into a wristlet by tying on a length of gingham ribbon (see the bottom pic above).
Are Studio is here.
When you make clothes in the country’s biggest manufacturing region, you see depressing & gargantuan levels of waste up close. The day after my Are visit, I popped into several places around town that help keep made-in-L.A. clothing possible with an emphasis on secondhand and deadstock materials, including a massive trimming emporium (apparently the best place to score vintage corozo buttons) and a 74,000-square-foot warehouse devoted to reams of never-used textiles, many of which originated with major designers and world-class mills.
My guide was a gifted L.A. designer who only uses deadstock materials. It’s a productive constraint, in her case, that has resulted in some of my favorite pieces out —