Blouses

Many big-name L.A.-based designers - Rodarte, Gregory Parkinson, Rachel Zoe, Barbara Tfank, Skaist-Taylor and Juan Carlos Obando among them - have already shown their fall 2012 collections at New York Fashion Week. Now in the middle of Los Angeles Fashion Week, it seems like a good time to meet other designers and labels that are shaping the L.A. fashion scene and giving it global reach. Of Two Minds The look: L.A.'s answer to Isabel Marant. The goods: Designer Sunjoo Moon marries Parisian chic and West Coast cool for a world-traveler vibe seen in fur vests, maxi-length dresses done in relaxed 1970s silhouettes, cozy knits and trousers festooned with subtle tribal patterns.

I am totally in favor of students being required to wear similar clothing or uniforms while on their school campuses. I am a sworn police officer with the city of Downey. I am currently assigned to the Administration Division and I am teaching the D.A.R.E. program in our public and private schools (fifth and seventh grades). This is my fifth year of working in Downey classrooms. I have observed varied behavior among students, and I believe much of their attitude and demeanor is manifested by the clothing they wear to school.

Julia Tavalaro heard her baby whimper, then sob, then cry. It was an omen. She had just tucked Judy, who was 14 months old, into her little yellow pajamas and put her to bed. Her husband, George, was in the den watching a ballgame. Julia went to the living room fireplace and stood quietly, as she did sometimes to find strength, especially when she had one of her headaches. Fondly she thought back to Judy's first birthday. There would be a party for her second one, too: hats, noisemakers . . .

On a recent fall evening, three young women walk down Beverly Boulevard together toward Jerry's Deli. They're dressed in vertiginous high heels, cut-off frayed denim shorts, sheer peasant blouses and, for the tallest in the group, a floppy brown suede hat. Their outfits might lead an observer to conclude they are on their way to a Malibu beach party. But after they pass the deli's brightly lighted windows, they stop in front of the Beverly nightclub, and within seconds they bypass the crowd huddled around the doorman and claim their places inside.

Debby is tall and blonde and hardened well beyond her 18 years. She has a knife in her purse, a crumpled wad of $20 bills in her shoe and a bad attitude. Tonight she is working Harbor Boulevard, an Orange County hangout for prostitutes and pimps and the small-time punks who peddle their crack and heroin, and tomorrow maybe it will be Sunset Boulevard or San Diego or somewhere else. Debby is a prostitute. She doesn't really care where she sells her body.

Flip through any how-to book on job interviewing and you're bound to run into the same timeworn tenets on how to dress when facing the hiring squad. "A conservative two-piece business suit" is appropriate for men and women, according to "The College Grad Hunter" (2008) by Brian D. Krueger, with women clad in pantyhose "at or near skin color."

Nepal has been alloted a quota worth $350 million in exports of cotton trousers, shirts, blouses and skirts to the United States over the next three years under an agreement signed today between the two countries. The memorandum of understanding was signed by new U.S. Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch and Nepal Commerce Secretary Damodar Gautam, the U.S. Embassy announced.

The "Made in Italy" label conjures images of little old men and women in aprons and spectacles, stooped over wooden tables, cutting leather and sewing by hand in workshops that dot the hills of Tuscany. It certainly doesn't make you picture Chinese immigrants toiling long hours in ramshackle, poorly illuminated sheds, and then sleeping in small rooms behind thin plywood right there in the factories.