Trends

Like many honor students with dreams of going to an Ivy League university, Burton Liao has been taking a test preparation course to boost his scores on college entrance exams. But unlike his classmates in the summer program, Liao has plenty of time left to learn SAT vocabulary words and score-boosting strategies before the big test day arrives. He's only 13 years old.

At first glance, the shopping cart filled with canvases looks like it might be a work of conceptual art, an installation that equates paintings with groceries. And indeed, that's the intent at Artspace Warehouse on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles: paintings so affordable, you might consider stocking up. "The gallery is very unintimidating," said owner Claudia Deutsch, who brought the concept from her gallery in Zurich, Switzerland, to Los Angeles last year. Artspace Warehouse is laid out with paintings on movable walls that flip like pages in a giant picture book.

Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain and ducks inside. "Isn't this wild?" she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana grow room she and her husband recently installed. "This used to be my daughter's bedroom. " Wild is one word for it. Bright is another.

Pat Kelly received a pair of cuff links from her father when she was 14 that started her on a lifelong crusade to snap up every one she could find. Forty-four years later, Kelly has amassed at least 25,000 pairs of the shirt-cuff closers. The Orange resident has cuff links adorned with virtually every letter of the alphabet, every animal, every sport, every automobile and every profession.

The sign hanging outside the Sportsmen's Lodge hotel in Studio City Sunday made a gallon-sized promise: "This year's newest trend." Was it collecting old Elvis hotel keys? Mangled manhole covers? How about belly-button lint? No way. It was milk caps. That's right, milk caps--those waxed cardboard thing-a-ma-jobbies that protected the tops of your grandmother's milk bottles way back when.

Forget personal assistants, orchestra seats at Disney Hall and SUVs as big as summer cabins. Nothing quite makes the point that one has arrived in Los Angeles like a custom-built hillside home with a view. L.A. County hills are akin to an immense three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that has been filling in over a century of continuous development. And there are few pieces left.

Inside a glistening building in an otherwise gritty industrial zone near downtown Los Angeles, young men with trendy hair and tattooed arms sit in front of oversize computer screens and click to the low thump of a hip-hop tune. The place could pass for a video-gamer boot camp were it not for the piles of pricey jeans and T-shirts in every corner of the room.

In Paris, women clutch flirtatious little Chanel bags, so small they hold next to nothing. In New York, they take the opposite tack, lugging mega-tote bags that bend their backs into Quasimodo crouches, so they can keep their subway reading, gym clothes and other such sundries close at hand. But in Los Angeles, women breeze around town carrying nothing except a set of keys. That's because the quintessential California purse comes with four wheels and a trunk.

Summer's the time for wearing baseball caps, but this season the soft hats with the long bills are no longer just for taking out to the ballgame. Baseball caps are everywhere, from the fashion runways of Milan to the streets of Los Angeles. Hollywood's beautiful people--including Janet Jackson, Madonna and Eddie Murphy--are wearing baseball caps as symbols of their street-wise chic.

On a recent Thursday night in Hollywood, NBA player James Harden was holding court, but there wasn't a basketball in sight. The second-string guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder was partying at Roxbury, celebrating his 22nd birthday with several hundred of his closest friends. Jammed into a circular corner booth with roughly 40 others, Harden took swigs from a bottle of Patron as hip-hop music blasted and leggy ladies in short dresses filled the dance floor. The $13,000 moment came when a parade of runway-ready "bottle servers" sashayed toward his table carrying his order of 22 bottles of Moet & Chandon.