Downtown L.A. has officially earned its place on the hipster map.
Comme des Garcons, the avant-garde Japanese clothing label most notable for its deconstructed, tattered and torn black clothing, is opening a guerrilla store here in the historic, but slowly gentrifying, banking district.
Of course, it's not easy to find. There's no sign or street number. It's sandwiched between a bar and a sneaker shop, behind a heavy black metal gate that leads to an alley. There, across from a green city Dumpster, is an industrial hole in the wall. Inside, the most unconventional designer fashion outpost in L.A.
Guerrilla stores, or temporary pop-up shops that offer an antidote to global retail homogenization, are a dime a dozen these days, with Fila, Target and Hanes having established their own versions. But Comme des Garcons (French for "like boys") was at the forefront of the trend, opening its first guerrilla store in Berlin in 2004, with a commitment to focusing on marginalized areas of cities that have grit to spare, including Berlin; Warsaw; Athens; Reykjavik, Iceland; Helsinki, Finland; and Beirut. The L.A. store is the first in the U.S.
CDG designer Rei Kawakubo's clothes aren't for everyone. Her Paris runway shows are famously out there: One collection featured spandex tops and skirts with down-filled lumps and bumps; another fused men's and women's clothing, with a corset superimposed on a men's suit jacket, for example.
But she found a kindred spirit in L.A.'s Brett Westfall, who is opening CDG's L.A. store and whose own conceptual label Unholy Matrimony also specializes in the deconstructed and unconventional -- from pants violently shredded at the knees to tailcoats with checkerboard lapels. Kawakubo and Westfall collaborated on a limited-edition T-shirt collection for Spring/Summer 2005. CDG was "one of the first people to represent me when I started my brand," Westfall said. "I was 23 -- I was like a baby."
The guerrilla concept is simple: Comme des Garcons accepts proposals from fashion fanatics (usually not designers) who agree to keep the store open for no more than a year, whether it's making money or not. The location must be historic and set apart from any established commercial areas. The space itself has to have character (presumably of the fallout-shelter variety).
