Lifestyle
L.A. has some of the best vintage in the game. These finds are a case in point
For every time you hear an Angeleno smugly say “I thrifted it,” there’s a story behind the last hands that held the garment. Maybe it belonged to a fabulous Hollywood costume designer. Maybe it was languishing at the back of a Silver Lake dad’s closet.
Either way, our clothes carry memory. While there are the big moments — like the dress your fave wore to the Oscars, or your first dinner at Damian — it’s the small moments in between that give a piece life. They’re the stains you can’t rub out, the holes around the collar, the crease marks forever etched into fabric. “Second life” is used often in this space, but it’s really one long, serpentine timeline.
Though fashion and passing down clothes are a collaborative effort, for vintage store sellers, a well-curated collection is a deeply personal act. Each seller brings their own story, knowledge, and imagination. We should all be thankful.
In L.A., we’re lucky to have some of the best vintage stores in the game. Where else could you find Ben Davis in the same place as an Armani suit? For this story, I reached out to four vintage sellers and asked them to share their most cherished items — the ones they can’t bring themselves to pass on, be it from their own wardrobe or a recent acquisition. All of the stores opened within the last 10 years: Le Boudoir (2022) specializes in new, Paris-imported lingerie; Aralda Vintage (2015) is known for playful designer womenswear; Wild West Social House (2023) uses a membership model for rare and high-end finds; and Millersroom (2015) is a haven for quality denim and remixed button-ups and blazers.
From leather chaps to a vintage Dior coat, the items that these sellers shared are reminders of why they do what they do — and what makes a piece last a lifetime.
Clémence Pariente of Le Boudoir: Vintage A-1 Genuine Leather Chaps
Clémence wears Réalisation Par dress, Suzanne Rae shoes.
I started collecting lingerie when I was about 15 years old. I would babysit at the time, and all the money from babysitting would go into this. I would never tell my mom, but I would wear those super big, long ’70s dresses and under, a full set: garter, stockings, corset. No one would know about it. I wasn’t even dating. It was fully for myself. It had no male gaze involved in it. It was very much something that made me feel so empowered, so feminine, so confident. I felt strong. It was my own secret. Super punk, in my head.
My style was more sleazy vintage: crazy ’80s lace, red leather, studded pieces that were really influenced by all the metal I was listening to. I started riding motorcycles a few years ago because I went through a breakup, and I think I needed a good adrenaline rush. Something that would make me feel. I felt so depleted of self-confidence, and I was such a shell of myself. I was looking for something that would empower me, and I loved the idea of being able to ride motorcycles with other women.
“That’s why I started thrifting sexy leather pieces … I like the idea of removing those pieces and recontextualizing them into something more empowering.”
— Clémence Pariente of Le Boudoir
That’s why I started thrifting sexy leather pieces. I loved it as a whole aesthetic, but I wanted to remove it from this motorcycling boy world. I like the idea of removing those pieces and recontextualizing them into something more empowering.
I consider every piece that I find in Paris a little treasure. They’re like little trinkets from my travels. The French brands are better, and it’s easier for me to find some Dior pieces, for example, because they’re more affordable there. My customers love the romance and rarity because it comes from Paris.
But while on a ride in Idyllwild, I found these assless chaps, and I don’t think I’ll ever sell these ones, because I think this is the one piece that actually comes full circle. I rode in it, opened the store and used it to style a Playboy shoot.
I didn’t ride for too long, but I think it gave me the confidence I needed to open the store. I thought that if I can ride a motorcycle by myself, even though I was terrified of even driving a f—ing car, l can do anything else.
Brynn Jones Saban of Aralda Vintage: 2004 Vintage Dior Coat
Brynn wears Vivienne Westwood Fall/ Winter 1991/1992 from Pechuga Vintage, antique slip dress, Darner socks, Prada shoes. Hair Mike Lorenzano; Makeup Sophie Haig
At a young age, I was really drawn to clothes and fashion. Music videos and magazines were an escape for me. It was this ultimate fantasy of mine to be able to see such wonderful clothes and dress in them.
I grew up with Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears in my prime teen years. It was incredible for me to experience that giant pop phenomenon through my formative years. The textures and the velvet and sequins of the time never went away. You find a lot of that at Aralda.
I started sixth grade in 1996, and “Clueless” was just everything to everyone. So I showed up to school with a pen with feathers all over it and a sequin shirt. I was so into expressing myself through clothes. Looking back, it was such an amazing time because I was so confident, and I didn’t really care at all what people thought. Like, at some point, I wore a beeper that wasn’t even working just because it was part of my look.
I moved to Hawaii from Portland after I graduated high school and went to school for a semester and a half, then dropped out. I stayed in Hawaii and worked random jobs at a sandwich shop and a hotel. Then, I moved to Honolulu and started working at this giant mall there called Ala Moana. On my breaks, I would stop by the fancy stores and get super inspired. That was autumn/winter of 2004, and I remember so vividly going into Dior. This was during John Galliano’s tenure with the house. It was wild; there were crazy prints — plaids, leopard spots — in my favorite colors. Back then — I don’t even know if they still do this — they had these big flatscreens in the stores playing the runway show on loop. I remember standing there watching the whole show.
Christian Dior Fall 2004 by John Galliano
A couple years ago, I bought the insane giant cocoon jacket Gisele Bündchen wears in the show. I also had no business really even buying that because it’s so rare and a collector’s piece. It’s so rooted into this memory of mine. I was like, f— it. I’m buying this, and it’s very sentimental to me now. I was having a really good year at the shop, so I bought it not just for me but for my younger self.
The following year, Kensington Palace emailed the store asking for a 1950s Yves Saint Laurent for Dior dress we loaned to Bella Hadid. My store manager James [Gallagher] and I were like, ‘This has got to be a scam. Someone’s just trying to steal our dress.’ But they told us they were curating this exhibition at the Kensington Palace, “Crown to Couture,” and they wanted to feature the dress in the show. So we flew to London, my husband and I, for the first time, and I finally wore my big, loud cocoon coat to the exhibition preview. I was in London, wearing my coat, on the dime of my business that I built doing all this.
Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel and Max Feldmann of Wild West Social House: Vivienne Westwood 1970s Seditionaries Muslin Top, Vintage 2001 Gucci Snakeskin Karate Pants
Max, left, wears Raf Simons AW2005 Eisenhower Jacket, Maison Martin Margiela SS2005 Artisanal Inside-Out Pants. Kyle wears Gianni Versace shirt, Vacheron Constantin watch, Margot de Taxco necklace.
Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel: We’re building an ecosystem with Wild West Social House. I really do believe that if we put a moratorium on making clothing, nothing would change. We have all the clothing we ever need. I don’t like a lot of how we’re forced to interact with clothing. There hasn’t really been any innovation in the past 100 years in it. We offer our members a way to consume clothing that’s better, cheaper and more sustainable than what they’ve been offered. It’s a rising-tide-raises-all-boats ecosystem. And that’s really what we’re getting at here.
“This top just feels like pure punk lives in it … Whoever had this found it for a reason, and I’m sure it’s lived 100 lives before it got to me, and I like to think about the souls that inhabit it.”
— Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel talking about Vivienne Westwood’s vintage mid-’70s top.
My parents were both in the punk scene. These tops were sold strictly by mail order within punk magazines. You would send in a check for 550 British pounds, tell them what print you wanted, and it would come back this way. I’m very interested in objects and places that feel like they have a soul. There’s an ancient Mesopotamian belief that physical objects can invite an external presence from a soul into it, and I’m very into pieces that I believe conjure that. I think fashion is exactly that. I wonder who owned it before me. This top just feels like pure punk lives in it. There was no mass dissemination of counterculture the way we have now. Whoever had this found it for a reason, and I’m sure it’s lived 100 lives before it got to me, and I like to think about the souls that inhabit it. This isn’t a piece you stumble upon by accident. It makes my heart stop anytime someone rents it out.
Vintage Mid-’70s Vivienne Westwood top. Max with Vintage 2001 Gucci Snakeskin Karate Pants.
Max Feldmann: My dad used to run record stores back in Arizona before I was even born, so I always had vintage T-shirts growing up. It started to click when people started asking me how much my shirts were. When my mom was in town she’d asked me to go with her to an archive store, and I saw pieces and silhouettes that I was not seeing anymore being created. The authenticity behind some of the old Comme des Garçons, Margiela — it spoke to me in a different way. It’s a better way to dress. I started getting into Japanese designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Number (N)ine. It just opened me up to this world. I was a men’s buyer for six years and worked at so many different retail stores, and I’d never seen silhouettes like that. They were just so bespoke. When everything’s one of one, but that one thing fits perfectly, there’s no better feeling in the world.
When we got a new consigner, I was really excited, because I had seen these karate pants before in other fabrications, but I never saw them in this snakeskin. These were worn on the runway — Spring/Summer 2001 Gucci by Tom Ford. I just love the shape, the silhouette and the construction. And it has a wrap tie. Men never wear wrap ties. It’s so versatile and could fit anywhere from like a size 30 to a size 36.
Marquise Miller of Millersoom: Vintage Carhartt Pants
Marquise wears Martine Rose and Supreme T-shirt, vintage cardigan from Millersroom, vintage Levi’s pants from Millersroom and Loewe shoes.
Vintage clothes were my entry point into fashion. I’m obsessed with “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “A Different World” and “Kids” with Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny. I loved these styles so much, I was like, “I’m going to figure out a way to make a world out of it.”
Millersroom is a convenience store. It’s a vintage convenience store where you have your books, you have your records, you have your Picasso book. You also have your Levi’s. You have your reconstructed party dress. But then again, you have a distressed jacket with your blazer.
“It’s about the best jeans that hold up. It could be a Dickies. It could be a Carhartt. It could be an old pair of Walmart Rustler jeans.”
— Marquise Miller
People who shop at the store always want a good pair of jeans, and I try to tell them that it’s not about Levi’s jeans. It’s about the best jeans that hold up. It could be a Dickies. It could be a Carhartt. It could be an old pair of Walmart Rustler jeans. You just need a good pair of denim that sustains and will look chic with whatever loafers.
I feel the most successful when I wear these Carhartt pants. They’ve been through it, but they’re still here, heavy and great. There’s so much character in the stray paint strokes, the blackened thighs. I need to feel like I know what I’m doing, and they help me feel more assertive and in alignment. I feel assertive when I feel aligned. They’re my superpower pants.
I love that I can change the world with my vision through fashion. What I say goes. I go out and source new old clothes, and I feel good. When I’m styling, I love when I’m able to bring something from here and mix it in with all the fabulous designer clothes, and my clients gravitate to my piece. That’s my favorite. That’s when I was like, I’m really doing my big one because that brings something that I know they’re not gonna be able to find anywhere else.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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