Lifestyle
After developers gentrified her old neighborhood, cherished plant shop owner starts fresh
On any given weekend, Degnan Boulevard, bookmarked by West 43rd Street, vibrates with activity. As you walk down the street, the sound of African drums blends into Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” The music comes from massive speakers propped beside various street vendors: people selling clothes, books, cannabis, sea moss and more.
A customer lifts up a prayer plant.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
If you continue this casual stroll north, you’ll eventually spot an orange wall with green accents. The vendors’ music — Stevie Wonder is playing now — flows through its low gate. As you follow it, you step into a verdant oasis. A wide open green space big enough for two boys to pass their soccer ball back and forth gives way to a greenhouse teeming with “wishlist plants.” And if you’re brave enough to step deeper into the lot, yet clearly not confident in ascertaining a Golden Pothos from a Pothos N’Joy, a woman with a warm smile will approach you kindly.
“Welcome to the Plant Chica. Have you visited us before?”
In spring 2023, developers in the quickly gentrifying West Adams neighborhood handed Sandra Mejia a 90-day eviction notice on the lease for her plant store, the Plant Chica, a business she started in 2018. Having a bricks-and-mortar store was a dream for the onetime medical assistant. Therefore, Mejia had to reckon with whether to open herself up to more emotional turmoil as she searched for a new location to reopen in.
“We were super sad about losing the space and we were having a really hard time letting go of it,” said Mejia, who co-owns the Plant Chica with her husband, Bantalem Adis. “I felt like I was never going to find anything as special as that space was — not just for me but for the community.”
While the Plant Chica continued to complete online orders after the eviction, Mejia doubted whether to continue the business at all. Business had been slow during winter 2023; and although the community poured into a GoFundMe page dedicated to helping the store stay afloat, Mejia and her husband had sold or given away nearly their entire inventory before closing. “Should I be doing this?” Mejia asked herself.
Co-owners of the Plant Chica, Sandra Mejia, left, and Bantam Adis, at their old West Adams location in 2022.
(Wesley Lapointe / Los Angeles Times)
Ironically, it was a 2023 Times story published about the store’s eviction plight that led Mejia to a solution. Robbie Lee, interim chief executive officer of the Black Owned and Operated Community Land Trust, read the article and thought Mejia might be a good fit for what his organization was trying to build in Leimert Park, the heart of Black Los Angeles.
“The energy that she brought to the area that she was at in West Adams was something that we specifically felt would be a good energy for Leimert,” Lee said. “She seemed to have some really strong ties to the South L.A. community and she seemed to also have an interest in being a part of a community that was really tied to a community of color and culture. And so we felt that it would be a good fit to try to help support her in identifying a space.”
At first, Lee showed Mejia a few bricks-and-mortar options on Degnan Boulevard, but they didn’t quite fit the greenhouse feel Mejia was looking for. Then Lee walked Mejia over to an empty lot managed by Community Build Inc., the L.A.-based nonprofit offering education, training, support services and employment placement assistance. The lot had previously been rented for various community and private events throughout the year, but otherwise it sat unattended to.
Dana Gills Mycoo, left, and Martin Mycoo shop for houseplants at the new Plant Chica store in Leimert Park.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Reopening would take a lot of sacrifice — namely, in March 2024, Mejia and her husband had to give up their place and move in with her parents to save money. But Mejia instantly knew she found the shop’s new home.
“It feels like the space was literally sitting here waiting for us because it cannot be any more perfect for us,” she said.
After signing the lease in June 2024, the Plant Chica reopened in Leimert Park Village in October.
Originally, the Plant Chica store, which opened on Jefferson Boulevard in West Adams in 2021, had been an old auto body shop that was retrofitted to be a greenhouse. But with the open lot in Leimert Park, Mejia could craft the plant shop of her dreams: a big dome-style greenhouse designed to be weather-resilient.
“It just feels so magical, especially when the sun is hitting the greenhouse, the way the sun bounces on the leaves,” Mejia said. “I always also wanted rocks, which I know is something so small, but to me, to be able to hear people walking on rocks is so therapeutic.”
The new space is also special for another reason: The open space allows Mejia to more easily facilitate the community events and collaborations she is well-known for.
Sandra Mejia, left, helps Reginald Alston pick out a plant.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“Most people see a plant shop,” said Jasmine Clennon, 36, a regular customer and friend of the store. “We see a communal space so we can come together.”
Clennon knows Mejia through their kids and recalls Mejia turning the new shop’s lawn into a Halloween party for the kiddos after trick-or-treating. Other hallmark Plant Chica events include queer poetry readings hosted by Cuties Los Angeles, yoga classes hosted by Black Women’s Yoga Collective, and of course, the store’s popular Adopt-a-Plant series.
“How do I say this without getting emotional?” said Clennon on a recent trip to the plant store as her school-aged daughter played at her feet. “Seeing her resiliency, opening it back up and specifically being intentional about it being in a Black community, is great.”
Customers browse the Plant Chica greenhouse.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
This significance is also not lost on Mejia, who shared that the transplant identities of many of the business owners in West Adams precluded her from feeling connected to them.
“In West Adams, I was trying to create community, and it was kind of exhausting,” she said. “There’s already so much culture here [in Leimert Park]. I just get to add to that.”
Mejia added that she feels exceptionally seen and supported in Leimert Park, which lends itself to a natural reciprocity on her part.
“A lot of businesses will take, take, take and not put back into the neighborhoods they’re in,” she said. “But I think it’s different when you’re from the neighborhood. You’re like ‘No, I grew up here. I want to see this neighborhood thrive.’”
For her part, Mejia created maps of the historic Degnan strip to give to her customers. The idea, she said, is “Don’t just get back in your car after visiting the Plant Chica. Here’s this map. Go support the other businesses.”
That peer-support includes businesses found on the Plant Chica’s own lawn.
Owner Sandra Mejia offers free greenhouse space to other small businesses to sell their merchandise.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Amorette Brooms, 47, ran a storefront on Pico Boulevard for over a decade before financial shortfalls in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to close down. When the Plant Chica reopened in Leimert Park, Brooms reached out to Mejia via social media to see if they could collaborate in some way. She was shocked when Mejia offered her a free space to sell her merchandise instead.
“I was like ‘What do you mean you’re not going to charge me?’” said Brooms, who sells planters. “It kind of restores my faith in humanity.”
Today, four businesses, Brooms’ Queen, Louis LIV Design, Golden Garden and Plant Man P, sell their products rent-free at the Plant Chica. The retail model allows small business owners to fully sell through their inventory without falling prey to pop-up events that typically leave them in the hole, Brooms said.
Now Brooms, in turn, is planning to bring her Tiny Plant Desk series — a play on NPR’s popular Tiny Desk series — to the Plant Chica. Which for Mejia is exactly the point of giving back.
Sandra Mejia, owner of the Plant Chica.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“I feel like people support us so much because they know that if they spend money here, there’s going to be an awesome event that’s going to be free to the community, which is hard to get,” Mejia said.
In addition to helping customers with their plant selections, Mejia also rings them up at the register and then busies herself with tidying and organizing the shop. She has no employees, but she still has ambitious goals. Two weeks ago, she officially filed the paperwork for her nonprofit, co-founded with Brooms, Plant Power to the People. And she’s hoping to organize a Los Angeles Earth Day Festival, hosted in Leimert Park, by April. To outsiders, Mejia’s pursuits and projects may seem overwhelming, but where Mejia had doubts about her future a year ago, she now knows she’s exactly where she’s meant to be.
“People are always like ‘Oh, you do so much for your community,’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, but my community does a lot for me too,’” she said, explaining that community members cleaned her wind-strewn lawn in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires while she was busy organizing donations for Altadena residents who lost their homes. “I’m being so fulfilled and feeling like I’m walking in my purpose, and as a person, I don’t know that there’s anything greater than to be like, damn, I love what I do.”
It’s impossible to not feel this love — this sense of community — when you walk through the Plant Chica’s Degnan Avenue gate humming the soulful tunes — Luther Vandross is playing now — of the vendors outside.
“I feel like everything is a lesson,” Mejia said. “[My son] saw us open on Jefferson and he cut the ribbon then. And then, he cut the ribbon again here in Leimert Park. I think that was super special because it shows him that if things sometimes may not go your way, you can’t just give up. You got to keep going and find new ways.”
The sign for the Plant Chica’s new location.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
When John Lantigua, a retired journalist in Miami Beach, checked his email one recent morning, he was glad to see an invitation.
“It was like, ‘Come and share an evening with me. Click here for details,’” Mr. Lantigua said.
It appeared to be a Paperless Post invitation from someone he once worked with at The Palm Beach Post, a man who had left Florida for Mississippi and liked to arrange dinners when he was back in town.
Mr. Lantigua, 78, clicked the link. It didn’t open.
He clicked a second time. Still nothing.
He didn’t realize what was going on until a mutual friend who had received the same email told him it wasn’t an invitation at all. It was a scam.
Phishing scams have long tried to frighten people into clicking on links with emails claiming that their bank accounts have been hacked, or that they owe thousands of dollars in fines, or that their pornography viewing habits have been tracked.
The invitation scam is a little more subtle: It preys on the all-too-human desire to be included in social gatherings.
The phishy invitations mimic emails from Paperless Post, Evite and Punchbowl. What appears to be a friendly overture from someone you know is really a digital Trojan horse that gives scammers access to your personal information.
“I thought it was diabolical that they would choose somebody who has sent me a legitimate invitation before,” Mr. Lantigua said. “He’s a friend of mine. If he’s coming to town, I want to see him.”
Rachel Tobac, the chief executive of SocialProof Security, a cybersecurity firm, said she noticed the scam last holiday season.
“Phishing emails are not a new thing,” Ms. Tobac said, “but every six months, we get a new lure that hijacks our amygdala in new ways. There’s such a desire for folks to get together that this lure is interesting to people. They want to go to a party.”
Phishing scams involve “two distinct paths,” Ms. Tobac added. In one, the recipient is served a link that turns out to be dead, or so it seems. A click activates malware that runs silently as it gleans passwords and other bits of personal information. In all likelihood, this is what happened when Mr. Lantigua clicked on the ersatz invitation link.
Another scam offers a working link. Potential victims who click on it are asked to provide a password. Those who take that next step are a boon to hackers.
“They have complete control of your email and, in turn, your entire digital life,” Ms. Tobac said. “They can reset your password for your dog’s Instagram account. They can take over your bank account. Change your health insurance.”
Digital invitation platforms are trying to combat the scam by publishing guides on how to spot fake invitations. Paperless Post has also set up an email account — phishing@paperlesspost.com — for users to submit messages for verification. The company sends suspicious links to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a nonprofit that maintains a database monitored by cybersecurity firms. Flagged links are rendered ineffective.
The scammers’ new strategy of exploiting the desire for connection is infuriating, said Alexa Hirschfeld, a founder of Paperless Post. “Life can be isolating,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. “When it looks like you’re getting an invitation from someone you know, your first instinct is excitement, not skepticism.”
Olivia Pollock, the vice president of brand for Evite, said that fake invitations tended to be generic, promising a birthday party or a celebration of life. Most invitations these days tend to have a specific focus — mahjong gatherings or book club talks, for instance. “The devil is in the details,” Ms. Pollock said.
Because scammers don’t know how close you are with the people in your contact list, fake invitations may also seem random. “They could be from your business school roommate you haven’t spoken to in 10 years,” Ms. Hirschfeld said.
Alyssa Williamson, who works in public relations in New York, was leaving a yoga class recently when she checked her phone and saw an invitation from a college classmate.
“I assumed it was an alumni event,” Ms. Williamson, 30, said. “I clicked on it, and it was like, ‘Enter your email.’ I didn’t even think about it.”
Later that day, she received texts from friends asking her about the party invitation she had just sent out. Her response: What party?
“The thing is, I host a lot of events,” she said. “Some knew it was fake. Others were like, ‘What’s this? I can’t open it.’”
Andrew Smith, a graduate student in finance who lives in Manhattan, received what looked like a Punchbowl invitation to “a memory making celebration.” It appeared to have come from a woman he had dated in college. He received it when he was having drinks at a bar on a Friday night — “a pretty insidious piece of timing,” he said.
“The choice of sender was super clever,” Mr. Smith, 29, noted. “This was somebody that would probably get a reaction from me.”
Mr. Smith seized on the phrase “memory making celebration” and filled in the blanks. He imagined that someone in his ex-girlfriend’s immediate family had died. Perhaps she wanted to restart contact at this difficult moment.
Something saved him when he clicked a link and tried to tap out his personal information — his inability to remember the password to his email account. The next day, he reached out to his ex, who confirmed that the invitation was fake.
“It didn’t trigger any alarm bells,” Mr. Smith said. “I went right for the click. I went completely animal brain.”
The new scam comes with an unfortunate side effect, a suspicion of invitations altogether. It’s enough to make a person antisocial.
“Don’t invite me to anything,” Mr. Lantigua, the retired journalist, said, only half-joking. “I’m not coming.”
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.
1
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.
2
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.
5
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.”
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