Rodeo DRIVE didn't become the swankiest shopping street in the world by accident. Pioneering fashion retailers including Fred Hayman, Dick Caroll, Jerry Magnin and Herbie Fink laid its glamorous foundations in the '60s and '70s by luring Hollywood's jet set into hip designer boutiques such as Giorgio Beverly Hills, Carroll & Co. and Theodore.
These were the salad days of shopping in L.A., before the mega malls and luxury brand temples moved in, when you could browse the Halstons with a gimlet in your hand, while chatting up Ali MacGraw. Rodeo was still a sleepy little street with gas stations, hardware stores and private bungalows, so parking was easy. And if you weren't up for driving, there was always an enterprising shop owner who would send a car for you, or have bags of clothes delivered to your manse for home shopping.
Theodore is the last independently owned boutique on the three-block street, having outlived his much flashier contemporaries. But the curtains fall on every era, and owner Fink now has the distinction of being the last of his generation to leave the fabled street.
The retailer is relocating to a newly designed, 4,000-square-foot space on nearby Camden Drive in a few weeks. His reasons are manifold, but "the street is boring now," said the whip-smart 85-year-old, who delivers most of his remarks with a curmudgeonly air, though he's as kind as he is blunt. "It's all Pucci-Gucci. It got too expensive, it's too corporate -- you could say all of that."
The Southern California native opened his first Theodore boutique, specializing in avant-garde fashion, on Rodeo in 1969, luring the likes of Cher, Marisa Berenson and Jaclyn Smith. He was the first to bring some of the most heralded designers of our time to the West Coast, including Sonia Rykiel, Issey Miyake and Dolce & Gabbana.
"Herb is a legend," Hayman said. "His stores were completely unique. He had really special things and still does."
The street's evolution into an outdoor designer mall is exactly what Fink hoped wouldn't happen when he helped launch the Rodeo Drive Committee in 1972, a merchant group spearheaded by Hayman to bring attention to their boutiques. "I joined so that Rodeo wouldn't become what it became," Fink said. "I wanted it to remain special."
