Lifestyle
Plants saved her life. Now she's helping others heal at her L.A. plant shop
On a Sunday afternoon, inside a whimsical Redondo Beach plant shop, eight women and I sat at a workshop table, smiling and laughing as we played with dirt.
With bird chirping sounds and mediation music humming in the background, we closed our eyes and dug our hands into containers filled with soil, noticing the coolness of it and its texture. There were tissue boxes within reach in case we needed to wipe away any tears.
In our Plant PPL series, we interview people of color in the plant world. If you have suggestions for PPL to include, tag us on Instagram @latimesplants.
“Remember when we were little, we weren’t scared of this,” said Barbara Lawson, who was leading the group at Meet Me in the Dirt, which she opened at the South Bay Galleria in 2022. In the 2,400-square foot space, which is brimming with houseplants and self-care products, Lawson holds gatherings such as group journaling events, wellness retreats, grief counseling sessions and today’s workshop, a soil meditation experience.
“The efficacy of gardening and mental health is a real thing,” said Lawson, who is also a certified grief counselor. “Not only did it heal me, [I’ve been] able to use it to help heal other people.”
At the workshop table, Lawson offered us gloves but discouraged us from wearing them, so we could experience the benefits of putting our hands in the soil. Some research suggests that a bacterium found in soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, may help fend off stress.
“My mama used to tell me, ‘A little dirt don’t hurt,’” Lawson, 51, quipped.
“The efficacy of gardening and mental health is a real thing,” said Barbara Lawson, who is also a certified grief counselor.
Workshop participants massage their hands in soil to experience the healing benefits of it.
Lawson knows firsthand the impact that playing in soil and being exposed to greenery can have on one’s wellness. Although she grew up watching her grandmother tend to the fruit trees in her garden when she was a child, Lawson didn’t pick up gardening until she was in her 30s. As a wife and mother of six children — she has a blended family — Lawson used gardening to carve out alone time and express herself creatively. The self-taught painter, who only paints flowers and has a functional art business called Barbara’s Delight, planted trees and colorful flowers in her backyard. The garden was “my escape,” she said.
Then over time, Lawson stopped spending as much time in her garden. And before she knew it, more than a decade had passed since she’d tended to it.
“I’m a very optimistic person — that’s my normal personality — [but] I started noticing a very dull sadness [in myself],” she recalled. “It didn’t come on all of a sudden, it was something that crept in a little bit at a time.”
Lawson realized that she was going through a period of depression because she’d never fully grieved her mother’s death. Her mom died from congestive heart failure when Lawson was 24 years old.
Lawson regularly holds soil meditation experiences at Meet Me in the Dirt.
“If you do not deal with [grief], it can come back to create problems later,” Lawson said. Instead of confronting the pain of her mother’s death, she focused on her career and raising her family, she added.
“Nobody sits around and talks about how to deal with the loss of a person, a relationship or a career,” Lawson said, adding that other cultures such as the Latino community have holidays like Día de los Muertos to grieve their loved ones. But many Black people “are not in contact with whatever our traditional practices were, so beyond the funeral, there is no other support there.”
The thought of her mother “not being here hurt too much, so I pushed the memories away,” said Lawson, “even if I knew instinctively that I wanted to think about her.”
In 2016, Lawson started going to therapy for the first time, and her therapist suggested that she get back into gardening since it used to bring her so much joy. One day after she returned home from therapy, Lawson gutted her garden so she could start anew. At first, she planted vegetables and fruits, including eggplant, corn, watermelon and cucumber, as well as an herb garden.
When she was sad, she wanted to be around greenery “because that meant something was growing,” Lawson said. “Green is serene. It is calming and it just means growth. That’s what I felt like I needed.”
As she started to feel more like herself, she slowly added more color to her garden. She planted an array of flowers including black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta), daisy-like cosmos, sunflowers and pansies. She also decorated the garden with keepsakes from her life, including some of her mother’s antiques and her husband’s old work boots, which she used to hold plants.
“It was literally saving my life,” Lawson said. “Doing sustainable gardening helped me kind of put myself back together.” She documented her healing journey on Facebook and talked about the correlation that gardening had with her life.
After discovering several caterpillars in her backyard, Lawson decided to raise monarch butterflies in her garden as well. And to her surprise, they transitioned into fully formed butterflies on her mother’s birthday.
“It was like [God] being like, ‘It’s done,’” she said, adding that she felt like she’d gone through a transition just like the butterfly. “For Him to give me [that] gift on her birthday was a miracle.”
After this experience, Lawson started teaching people how to use plants for healing in their own lives via Facebook Live. She also demonstrated how to grow food and start herb gardens. And because her garden was overflowing with plants, she began selling some of them.
Then in early 2020, Lawson was laid off from her corporate job with an anesthesia company. The timing worked out perfectly, though, because she was already planning to leave so she could focus on building Meet Me in the Dirt.
Much like her own garden, Lawson has decorated her store with captivating and bright art pieces and other items.
Lawson designed Meet Me in the Dirt to feel like a healing oasis for patrons.
The plant shop, which is located at the South Bay Galleria, specializes in indoor houseplants.
In April 2021, she converted a small bus that she found on Facebook Marketplace into a mobile plant nursery, which she named “Oasis.” (She refers to Oasis as a woman.) Each weekend, she’d take Oasis to farmers markets and pop-up events around Los Angeles to sell plants and teach people about their healing powers. After several months of doing that, she purchased a space to do this outside of the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance.
A few months later, a representative from the South Bay Galleria asked her if she’d be open to having a storefront for Meet Me in the Dirt inside the mall. Lawson wasn’t interested at first because she loved her mobile nursery, but when she saw the space in person, she knew that she had to have it.
The retail space “fit into my God-sized dream,” she said, adding that she wanted to have a place where she could meet with her grief counseling clients, host events regularly and provide an overall wellness retreat experience. She officially opened the plant shop and wellness center in June 2022.
“Doing sustainable gardening helped me kind of put myself back together,” said Lawson.
Meet Me in the Dirt sells an array of houseplants and self-care products such as candles, body oils and bath salts that Lawson makes herself.
Lawson said she wants people to feel like they are transported into a healing oasis each time they enter the store. The space, which looks like an enchanted forest, is filled with easy-care houseplants including monsteras, different types of pothos, Zanzibar Gems (a.k.a. ZZ plants), calatheas and aglaonemas. Sparkling chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Floral sculptures appear throughout the store, including one that is garbed in a silk robe. A projector screen displays a peaceful waterfall and meditation music plays on a loop. There’s also a swing near the front of the shop, and a framed photo of Lawson’s mother sits near the cash register.
Once you walk over a turf-grass-covered bridge toward the back of the shop, there are five “Zen” rooms, which people ages 21 and up can rent for $50 to $100 per hour. (The price varies depending on which amenities you select, such as a meal, an art box, a massage with a professional masseuse, etc.). The rooms represent and are named after what people may need in their life at that time. The names include worthy, valued, cherished (this room has a massage chair inside), loved and chosen.
In addition to soil meditation experiences, Lawson hosts birthday parties, private gardening classes, bridal showers, women empowerment workshops and more at the shop. People can rent the store for private events as well.
Brenda Gallow, right, participates in a soil meditation experience at Meet Me in the Dirt.
Although Brenda Gallow has been to Meet Me in the Dirt several times, she started crying when she walked inside on a recent visit.
“It never fails,” she said. “The aroma. The scent. My soul [feels] like it’s releasing.”
Gallow met Lawson several years ago when she purchased a few Barbara’s Delight products. She also held her 60th birthday party at the Meet Me in the Dirt shop. What keeps her coming back is the feeling she gets when she’s there, Gallow said.
She believes the experience is more than just playing in the dirt. “You literally find yourself,” she said. “You can come and do work here. You can be worked on and blessed all at the same time.”
Gallow added, “This is a safe haven for no matter what you’re going through.”
For Angela Cooper, Lawson’s recent soil meditation event gave her “permission” to relax and prioritize herself.
“She knows I have a lot going on in my life and [that] I don’t get a lot of self-care in, so she wanted me to come and not worry about anything else. Not worry about the kids [or] my family — just worry about me” said Cooper, who has been friends with Lawson since high school. She’s attended several of Lawson’s workshops, but this was her first time doing the soil meditation.
“It was very refreshing and rewarding, especially when our hands were in that dirt,” she said, adding that it felt good to soothe herself with it. “I’m always blessed when I come here.”
Lawson comforts her friend, Tselane Gardner, a longtime mental health professional, at the end of the workshop.
In addition to soil meditation experiences, Meet Me in the Dirt hosts birthday parties, gardening classes and more.
Toward the end of the two-hour workshop, Lawson instructed everyone to pick a plant that we felt most called to. I chose a monstera, with its leaves like Swiss cheese, because of its uniqueness. Then Lawson told us to remove our plants from the flimsy plastic pots they came in, so we could repot and place them into larger pots that were more sturdy. (All of the materials, including the plants and pots, were provided by Lawson as part of the $75 workshop.)
It was easy to pull out my monstera plant from its original pot, but I watched as others struggled to remove theirs because the roots had grown so thick and tight. Some women even had to stand up in order to remove their plants.
“Sometimes you’re going to have to take really drastic moves [and] apply force to remove yourself from a place,” Lawson said in a tender, motherly tone. Like plants, we can get comfortable in a space even though we’ve outgrown it, she said.
That was the moment when Lawson’s message clicked for many of the women, including me, and tears began to fall.
Once we finished repotting our plants, one of Lawson’s assistants passed out plastic monarch butterflies for us to place in our pots. The butterflies were meant to serve as a visual reminder of how far we’d come and what we had to shed along the way in order to enter a new season.
“This is still a caterpillar,” Lawson said as she held up the plastic butterfly. “It’s just a fuller version of itself.”
You want to know where men’s fashion is heading? Follow the geeks.
These are the obsessives, fixated, with a NASA technician’s precision, on how their pants fit or on which pair of Paraboot shoes is the correct pair. These are the obsessives who in the aughts were early to selvage denim (now available at a Uniqlo near you!) and soft-shouldered Italian tailoring in the mode that, eventually, trickled down to your local J. Crew.
And where has the attention of this cohort landed now? On a vanguard of newish-to-the-West labels from Japan, like A.Presse, Comoli, Auralee and T.T.
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A.Presse is probably the most hyped of this cohort. What other label is worn by the French soccer player Pierre Kalulu and the actor Cooper Hoffman and has men paying a premium for a hoodie on the resale market? Kazuma Shigematsu, the founder, is not into attention. When we spoke, he wouldn’t allow me to record the conversation. Notes only.
“You mean a better-fitting denim jacket that’s based on an old Levi’s thing? Yeah, OK, sold,” said Jeremy Kirkland, host of the “Blamo!” podcast and the textbook definition of a latter-day Japanese men’s wear guy. Mr. Kirkland, once someone who would allocate his budget to Italian suits, admitted that, recently, over the course of two weeks, he bought four (yes, four) jackets from A.Presse1.
“I’m not really experimenting with my style anymore,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m just wanting really good, basic stuff.”
Basic though these clothes appear, their hook is that they’re opulent to the touch, elevated in their fabrication.
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Over the years, the designer Ryota Iwai has told me repeatedly that he is inspired by nothing more than the people he sees on his commute to the Auralee offices in Tokyo. When asked recently if he collected anything, he said nothing — just his bicycle.
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The true somber tale of this wave. The brand’s founder, Taiga Takahashi, died of an arrhythmia in 2022 at 27. The label has continued to plumb history for inspiration. The latest collection had pieces that drew on bygone American postal-worker uniforms.
An Auralee2 bomber looks pedestrian until you touch it and realize its silk. Labels like T.T3 make clothes that echo the specs of a vintage relic yet come factory fresh, notched up, made … well, better. They bestow upon the wearer a certain in-the-know authority.
And so there is a hobbyist giddiness present on Discord channels where 30- and 40-something men trade tips on how to size moleskin trousers by the Japanese label Comoli; at boutiques like Neighbour in Vancouver, British Columbia, where items like a $628 dusty pink trucker jacket from Yoko Sakamoto and an $820 T.T sweater sell out soon after hitting the sales floor.
What’s notable is how swiftly these geeky preferences have wiggled into the broader fashion community. While I was in Paris for the men’s fashion shows a year ago January, all anyone wanted to talk about were things with a “Made in Japan” tag. I would speak with editors who were carving out room in their suitcases for Auralee’s $3,000 leather jackets.
But these were clothes being shown away from the fashion week hordes. The A.Presse showroom was on a Marais side street in a space about as long as a bowling lane and scarcely wider that was crammed with racks of canvas, silk and denim jackets with Pollock-like paint splatters. There were leather jackets as plush as Roche Bobois sofas and hoodies based on sweatshirts made in America a half-century ago.
I got the hype. After 10 days of puzzling over newfangled stuff on the runways, the display of simple, understandable shapes we’ve known our whole lives, but redone with extra care, couldn’t have felt more welcome.
Kazuma Shigematsu, the A.Presse designer, said he had collected a trove of vintage pieces that he housed in a separate space to plumb for inspiration. He made new clothes based on old clothes that benefited from a century of small design tweaks.
By this January, A.Presse had upgraded to a regal maison facing the Place des Vosges, with giant windows and even more reverent hoodies, even more tender leathers. Back in America, I asked an online department store executive what his favorite thing from Paris was. He took out his phone to show me photos of himself trying on a zip-up leather jacket in A.Presse’s high-ceilinged showroom.
On Their Own Terms
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“We never think about trendiness or popular design details,” Ms. Sakamoto said through a translator. “It’s more like functionality, everyday use.” The label has a thing for natural dyes: pants stained with persimmon tannin, yellow ochre and sumi ink, shirts colored with mugwort and adzuki beans.
The sudden popularity of these labels outside Japan can make it feel as if they are new. Yet each label has built a respectable business within Japan, some for more than a decade. Auralee was founded in 2015. A year later, Yoko Sakamoto4 started its line. A.Presse is the relative baby of this cohort at five years old.
“A couple years ago, we would have to buy off the line sheet or go to Japan and see everything,” said Saager Dilawri, the owner of Neighbour, who has an instinct for what spendy, creative types lust after. “Now I think everyone from Japan is trying to go to Paris to get into the international market.”
This movement’s “Beatles on Ed Sullivan” moment occurred in 2018, when Auralee won the Fashion Prize of Tokyo, granting the designer, Ryota Iwai, financial support. Soon after, Auralee was given a slot on the Paris Fashion Week calendar.
“I had never seen a show before, never thought to do it,” Mr. Iwai said through a translator in February, days after his latest runway show. He has now done five.
As we talked, buyers speaking different languages entered his storefront showroom and ventured upstairs to scrutinize items like a trench coat that looked as if it was made of corduroy but was actually made from cashmere and wool and an MA-1 bomber jacket with a feathery merino wool lining peeking out along the placket.
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The Cale designer Yuki Sato travels throughout Japan to find textiles. Unusually, the company manufactures everything, including leather and denim, in one factory.
At Cale’s5 display off Place Vendôme, the designer Yuki Sato described denim trousers and pocketed work jackets as “modest, but perfectionist.” On the other side of the city, at Soshi Otsuki, whose 11-year-old label Soshiotsuki has gained attention for its warped vision of salary-man suits, I encountered buyers from Kith, a New York streetwear emporium better known for selling logoed hoodies and sell-out sneakers than for tailoring.
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Nearly a decade into its existence, Soshiotsuki has hit a hot streak. Soshi Otsuki won the LVMH Prize in 2025, and he already has a Zara collaboration under his belt. An Asics collaboration is set to arrive in stores soon.
Talking through translators with these designers, I began to worry that it might be unfair to group them together simply because they were all from Japan. Auralee simmers with colors as lush as a Matisse canvas, while Comoli’s brightest shade is brown. Soshiotsuki6 has mastered tailoring, while Orslow is known for its faded-at-the-knee jeans channeling decades-old Levi’s.
Rather, as with the Antwerp Six design clique that sprung out of Belgium in the early 1980s, it is these labels’ origin stories that thread them together.
“They’re being encountered on their own terms and respected on their own account, and they happen to be Japanese,” said W. David Marx, the author of “Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style” and a cultural critic who has lived in Tokyo for more than two decades.
“It is a new era of Japanese fashion on the global stage,” Mr. Marx said.
A Love Affair With Japan
Western shoppers have a history of falling hard for clothes from Japan. In 1981, when Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto crashed onto the Paris fashion scene, buyers swooned for their brainy, body-shrouding creations.
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Recently reintroduced as Number(N)ine by Takahiro Miyashita.
Years later, Number(N)ine7 and A Bathing Ape synthesized trends we would call American — grunge, streetwear and hip-hop — polished them up and sold them back to the West.
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Years before American men were trawling the internet for A.Presse, they would scour forums for deals on Visvim’s jeans and sneakers. Today, Visvim has stores in Santa Fe, N.M.; Carmel, Calif.; and Los Angeles.
Into the 2000s, clothing geeks were swapping tips on forums like Superfuture and Hypebeast about how to use a Japanese proxy service to buy Visvim’s8 seven-eyelet leather work boots or SugarCane’s brick-thick jeans.
Along the way, “Made in Japan” became a shorthand for “made well.” This was more than fetishization. As America’s clothing factories became empty carcasses pockmarking the heartland, Japan’s apparel industry grew steroidal.
“Japan still has an incredible manufacturing base for apparel that goes all the way from the textiles to the sewing to the postproduction,” Mr. Marx said.
Today, many Japanese labels produce most of their garments and, crucially, their textiles in Japan. When I first met Mr. Iwai years ago, I asked how he managed to create such lush colors. He answered, as if noting that the sky was blue, that he worked with the factories that developed his fabrics. As I spoke with Mr. Sato in January, he shared that Cale’s factory had been in his family for generations and also produced for other Japanese brands that I would know.
Chris Green, the owner of Ven. Space, a boutique in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn that has helped to introduce a number of these labels to an American market, suggested that because Japan is a small country with a fervent fashion culture, a competitive spirit has been stoked.
“They have to be able to cut through the noise,” Mr. Green said, with brands trying to prove that their cashmere sweater can outclass their peers’, that their silks are sourced from finer factories. What’s more, he said, once these brands have nailed a design, they stick with it. That is something that is important to men, in particular, who hate when a brand abandons its favored pants after a season.
Before he opened Ven. Space in 2024, Mr. Green was an admirer of many of these labels, purchasing them during trips to Japan. As we spoke, he was wearing a pair of Comoli belted jeans that he bought five or so years ago. A similar style is still available.
Primed for What They Were Pitching
At the close of the 2010s, streetwear was running on fumes. Quiet luxury was entering at stage left. If the Row and Loro Piana were expert at subtle, fine-to-the-touch clothes, so, too, were the likes of T.T, Graphpaper and Yoko Sakamoto.
“I went from this guy that wears pear-shaped pants to just wearing, like, a denim jacket,” said Chris Maradiaga, a tech worker and freelance writer in Vancouver. His wardrobe today consists of Comoli’s black-as-night trousers and a purple-tinged coat by Ssstein. His kaleidoscopic Bode jackets gather dust.
That Ssstein clothes have landed in the closets of men on the other side of the world defies the early guidance relayed to Kiichiro Asakawa, the label’s bushy-haired designer. His “senpais,” or mentors, warned him that his reduced designs might leave Western audiences cold. “You need something powerful,” they told him.
He tried, but it wasn’t necessary. It’s the most minimal designs — his cotton gabardine zip-ups, his “easy” pleated trousers — that people are most interested in now. “It actually makes me very happy,” he said through a translator. “My instincts were right.” Mr. Asakawa won the Fashion Prize of Tokyo in 2024.
Adapting to North American Markets (and Men)
Several Japanese designers noted that they had modified their sizing to accommodate larger, American bodies.
“I’ll ask them, Can you lengthen the pants by three centimeters? Because you need that for the Western market,” Mr. Dilawri of Neighbour said, noting that the designers were receptive to those requests.
A number of labels, like Comoli and Soshiotsuki, are already oversize. That’s the look.
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Kiichiro Asakawa ran a Tokyo boutique, Carol, before starting Ssstein in 2016. It’s still there. He, too, said he found inspiration in the everyday, for example when watching an elderly couple have dinner across a restaurant.
There is also the matter of price. On the whole, these clothes are not cheap. See Auralee’s silk bomber jacket, which could be military surplus but feels stolen from a sultan’s palace. It’s roughly $1,700. Ssstein’s9 Carhartt cousin chore jacket with a cowhide collar and a factory-massaged fade? About $1,000. Anyone who has traveled recently in Japan, where the yen is tantalizingly weak, will tell you that these Japanese-made clothes, after being imported, are far pricier in North America.
Yet, as luxury fashion labels continue to price out the aspirational middle-class shopper, many of those same shoppers have convinced themselves that the Japanese labels are a better value. A cashmere coat at Prada is $10,000, and you’ll need $1,690 to own a cotton-blend cardigan from Margiela. Similar pieces from Japanese labels can be half that price, or less.
“Brands like Bottega, Balenciaga, the Row — all that stuff — are so unobtainable,” said Mr. Kirkland, whose clothing budget has shifted to A.Presse. “I will never be in that price bracket,” he added, “but I’m wealthy enough to buy a chore coat for $800.”
Of course, Mr. Kirkland and all of the fans of these labels could own a chore coat for far less — but then it wouldn’t be “Made in Japan.”
About two-thirds of American women are plus-size, but here in L.A., you’d never know that by looking at the shifting retail landscape. Mass market plus-size retailers like City of Industry-based Torrid are closing dozens of stores, while big-box stores including Target and Old Navy have been stealthily reducing the amount of plus-size stock they carry on shelves, choosing instead to direct shoppers to their online portals.
The few locally owned plus-size boutiques aren’t faring much better. Recently, Marcy Guevara-Prete, owner of Atwater Village’s Perfect 10+, announced her intention to close her store on April 27. All clothes and accessories will be 60% off, and she is selling some of the store’s fixtures and mannequins.
After shuttering her decade-old, hot-pink, plus-size resale shop, the Plus Bus, in Highland Park last fall, she thought paring down her store’s stock and slightly expanding its sizing could save her business. Her rent in Highland Park was up to $6,000 a month, she says, and the move to a smaller space in Atwater Village cut her expenses in half.
But almost six months into running her new space as Perfect 10+, Guevara-Prete says it’s become increasingly clear: She was fighting a losing battle. “It feels really obvious that the store has to close, but it’s so heartbreaking,” she says.
Operating the Plus Bus and Perfect 10+ was more of a labor of love for her than a money-grab, she says, noting that she never once turned a profit on either store. A reality TV producer turned boutique owner, Guevara-Prete says she kept the stores running because she felt the plus-size community needed them.
Books and accessories for sale at Perfect 10+.
Marcy Guevara-Prete had high hopes for her store Perfect 10+ in Atwater Village. She previously operated the Plus Bus store in Highland Park. It closed last fall.
Not only were her stores well-curated retail oases — they featured mostly used clothes, but also a few new pieces — for those who couldn’t find a plethora of styles that could fit them at, say, Westfield Century City, but they were also stores that fostered community through sponsoring events such as plus-friendly pool parties and drag shows. And they were known for donating outfits and styling to members of L.A.’s transgender community.
The stores became a first stop for Hollywood stylists pulling looks for celebrities like Nicole Byer and Megan Stalter and an essential destination for out-of-town plus-size travelers who often came from communities where a store like the Plus Bus didn’t exist. (Byer and Lizzo also frequently sold or donated their used clothes to the store to sell.)
The Plus Bus also got national attention, getting acknowledged in an episode of “Hacks” as well as featured in an episode of Avery Trufelman’s “Articles of Interest” podcast about clothing.
So what happened?
Starting in 2023, Guevara-Prete says, the store’s sales began to dip. “They took this nosedive, and it seemed inexplicable,” she says. “Some people related it to the election or to uncertainty coming out of COVID, when people had that extra $600 a week to spend on things like clothes, but either way, the last three years have just been a total slog.”
Guevara-Prete says the downturn caused her to lay off most of her eight employees, and ultimately, she found herself taking out a few ill-advised business loans with less-than-favorable interest rates. All of this was happening while she was also struggling to land full-time freelance work in the entertainment industry, which is experiencing its own struggles.
“I was essentially making irresponsible decisions in order to keep [the stores] going, whether for spite, for ego, for the community or for the dream,” she says. “I really just had to face the music and make a choice that was really, really hard, especially when every single day people tell me how much the Plus Bus has changed them and how wonderful and affirming it’s been. Like, I don’t think anyone is going to talk about any episode of ‘Top Chef’ I produced at my funeral, but they absolutely will talk about the Plus Bus.”
In some sense, they already are. Guevara-Prete says there’s been a big outpouring of love from fans and shoppers who have supported the stores over the years.
At Perfect 10+ on a recent weekday afternoon, people poured in one after one, both to shop the deeply discounted racks and to pay their respects to Guevara-Prete, whom everyone met with hugs and lamentations about their collective loss.
Everyone visiting left with something: a pair of leopard print boots, a dress for a brother’s upcoming wedding or a red tango-friendly gown. Guevara-Prete says the oversize outpouring of support has been present online as well. But she wishes some of those fans had been shopping at her stores on a monthly or quarterly basis in recent years rather than now bemoaning what’s been lost.
A large selection of formal, casual and professional outfits hang on displays and racks at the Perfect 10+ in Atwater Village. The store will close Sunday.
“There’s a lot of chatter online about who isn’t selling plus sizes and who doesn’t carry your size, but there isn’t nearly enough promotion of the places that do,” she says.
Although the occasional plus-size pop-up like Thick Thrift still happens in L.A. and a few local plus-size resale shops remain, including Qurves in Burbank, MuMu Mansion in Mid-City and Hannah’s Hefty Hideaway on the city’s Westside, Guevara-Prete says she’s increasingly worried about where her store’s plus-size customers will be able to shop going forward.
“Where are people going to go in a pinch when there’s no brick-and-mortar that’s consistently open?” she asks. “Stores [like the Plus Bus and Perfect 10+] not existing is scary to me, because I need them. It just makes me feel like the plus-size community is being devalued even further as a population.”
Customer Dina Ramona Silva happened upon the Plus Bus’ initial Glassell Park location after moving to L.A. in 2015. For her, Guevara-Prete’s stores weren’t just retail outlets, they were also a sort of intellectual salon or spiritual sanctuary.
“I’ve been a big girl my whole life, like I came out of the womb 10 pounds, eight ounces. There has never been a point when I’ve been skinny,” Silva says. Finding a place like the Plus Bus, where “even the people who worked there were big, bodacious [and] fashionable” felt nourishing, like just stopping in to chat with people in the store could give her a boost of confidence that she might not find anywhere else.
On a recent day, shop owner Marcy Guevara-Prete sets a sign outside her store that reads, “Entire Store 40% off, Size 10+.”
“It changed my entire conception of who I was in the community,” Silva says. “A lot of times in female friend groups, there’s one single fat girl amidst all the other slender women and allies. Having a place like the Plus Bus helped me because then, it was me and a whole bunch of other plus-size baddies. It was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so cool. We could all share clothes and they’d fit!’”
Guevara-Prete’s stores have also been important spaces for L.A.’s trans, queer and gender-fluid communities. Eureka O’Hara, a drag performer who’s appeared on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and HBO’s “We’re Here,” says she found the Plus Bus about six years ago when she started to explore her gender identity, ultimately transitioning from presenting as nonbinary to being transfemme.
“The Plus Bus was so important to the queer and gender-fluid community because it gave us a place to feel comfortable trying clothes on,” O’Hara says. “Oftentimes I would show up, and they would have clothes already pulled for me. Also, I’m coming up on a year sober, but when I last relapsed, I came back to L.A. after having a relapse in Vegas. I ended up putting all my stuff in storage and went straight into a rehabilitation clinic and then sober living, so I didn’t have any of my belongings. Marcy made sure I had clothes to wear so that I could still present myself publicly on social media as a trans woman talking about my process of recovery, and she did it at no cost.”
O’Hara says she knows other trans women whose wardrobes are almost entirely from the Plus Bus, saying that if they couldn’t afford the clothes they wanted, the store would often give them “extreme discounts, if not free clothing.”
Shop owner Marcy Guevara-Prete, left, thanks customer Katie Pyne for coming in for one last visit.
Guevara-Prete says that while her stores’ closing has been “more bitter than sweet,” she’s still proud of the work she’s done with the Plus Bus and Perfect 10+.
“I never in a million years thought I would own a boutique or have the kind of healing that’s come from the Plus Bus community,” she says. “What I’ve experienced and learned about body positivity, body neutrality, fat liberation, fat acceptance and how that’s been translated from my clothes to my actual soul … There’s nothing like it. And I’d like to think that I’ve also healed people through this project and that people have made friendships and memories they’ll have for lifetimes at my events.”
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