Lifestyle
The greatest trees of Los Angeles
There is a sycamore in the front yard of my grandparents’ house, the house where my father grew up. It is a giant, towering over the home, the yard, the whole neighborhood. Last spring, when my grandmother was fading and the tree was coming into leaf, I stood under the sycamore for a long while, listening to the wind rustling its new growth. It was a delicate sound that, every so often, turned into a tremendous roar as the breeze went gusty.
My grandmother died a few weeks later. She was 101. The tree must be at least as old. Several months after she died, once the house was ready to sell, we all fell into a minor panic about the future of our beloved sycamore. Surely, anyone buying this small, old house would be developing the lot, and would take down the tree.
A sycamore tree in Griffith Park.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
But a day or two later, we learned that it is rather difficult — and also, illegal — to cut down a very old, still-alive sycamore, oak, California bay or black walnut in Los Angeles. It turns out the city has an entire department — its urban forestry division, and specifically its tree czar, Rachel Malarich — responsible for, among other things, saving such trees. All it took was alerting the office to the location and existence of our sycamore and the division would, if it hadn’t already, add it to its ever-growing list of trees it aims to protect.
I wrote “our sycamore” above, but great trees defy possessives. They are home to bees and birds and squirrels and ants and countless other critters. They are often older than all of us, older than the sidewalks, the streets, the parks. Older, sometimes, than the city itself.
These trees, belonging to no one, are for everyone.
The old sycamore was on my mind when, a few months ago, I got the idea to find and visit the greatest trees in all of Los Angeles. The idea wasn’t entirely my own — I was cribbing it from a tree of the year “contest” held in the United Kingdom, which, I came to learn, was itself part of a larger, European-wide tree of the year contest that includes at least 15 other nations, and began in the Czech Republic more than a decade ago.
Like the judges of these contests, I was interested in old, big trees — the sort of trees that tree pros and tree enthusiasts like to call specimens. I started my search for specimens by talking to many, many tree people: arborists, landscape architects, gardeners and garden nerds, historians and activists, tree-heads all. Like Jorge Ochoa, a horticulture professor at Long Beach City College, who suggested the tree he gets asked to identify most: a huge araucaria, also known as a bunya-bunya, that appears in the film “Blood In, Blood Out” and is an icon of East L.A. Or Jenny Jones, a landscape architect at Terremoto, who mentioned a “profoundly beautiful” mulberry in the Elysian Heights Elementary school garden. Leigh Jerrard, at Greywater Corps, said his favorite tree in L.A. was a valley oak on Chesebro Road in Agoura Hills, but then he caught himself. Had it survived the Woolsey fire a few years back? He wasn’t sure. He texted me a few days later. Nope. It was no longer alive.
A camphor tree, Cinnamomum camphora, at Evergreen Cemetery.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
Giant avocado tree in Atwater, near the L.A. River. (Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
A floss silk tree towers over the Yamaguchi Bonsai Nursery. (Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
This was the case with a lot of legendarily great L.A. trees: They were now dead. A few different tree-heads mentioned the gigantic silk floss that was once at the Hotel Bel-Air, and many more suggested the Encino Oak, which by some estimates was already 500 years old when the first Spanish expedition through California camped under it. But Jeff Perry, who knows fallen trees, told me that the greatest L.A. tree of all once stood on what is now Commercial Street at the 101 Freeway, not a half-mile from Angel City Lumber, which Perry runs.
“This tree is so important,” he told me. “It was the centerpiece of the Tongva village here. It stood when the pueblo was established, when Mexican occupation took over, when American occupation took over.” A winemaker shaded his casks under its limbs, then German immigrants bought the winery and turned it into a brewery. Eventually the tree, which had long been known as El Aliso — Spanish for sycamore — was turned into firewood. “The point,” Perry said, “is that this was a tree that witnessed multiple layers of colonization.” Today, on the corner by the freeway onramp, there is a small plaque about El Aliso, the great tree that stood there for so long, and saw so much.
Another, more recently dead great tree that I kept hearing about was the Eagle Tree, another huge sycamore and an old Compton landmark. Its trunk has been saved, and there are now plans to distribute young clones of the Eagle Tree throughout the Southland, thanks in large part to the work of Kim Cooper and Richard Schave, preservationists who run the L.A. tour company Esotouric. There were many other trees Cooper and Schave mentioned — East L.A.’s El Pino, an old queen palm on Bunker Hill called Sunshine, some more very old bunya-bunyas at Rancho Los Amigos — and several other trees out there to save and celebrate before they expire. But before all that, they told me, I simply had to speak to Don Hodel.
This was not the first nor the last I would hear of Hodel. In fact, pretty much every other tree-head I spoke to mentioned him either right off or in closing, or followed up a day or two later with something along the lines of what Cooper and Schave had said: that if I was looking for great trees, the best trees, the trees worth celebrating, I really ought to be talking to Don.
The prickly surface of the floss silk tree near Yamaguchi Bonsai Nursery.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
Ficus religiosa, Lafayette Park. Commonly called bo tree, it’s famous for being the same species that the Buddha meditated under when achieving enlightenment.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
Donald R. Hodel is the emeritus environmental horticulturist for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Los Angeles. In 1988, Hodel authored a book, published by the California Arboretum Foundation, titled “Exceptional Trees of Los Angeles.” It is exactly what its title describes: a book of very good — or, I’m sorry, exceptional L.A. trees. It is long out of print, but I found a copy, and was thumbing through it when we spoke.
I told Hodel about my plan, which had, after several weeks among the tree-heads, plus some scouting missions, been refined a touch. I was after, I’d decided, only the most public of trees, which meant simply: the more accessible, the better. Sure, there was a California buckeye I adored at Descanso Gardens, but any place you had to pay to see a tree was out. As were trees in private backyards, or high-fenced front yards. The tree had to be highly visible, enjoyable and not a tree you had to hike too far to see. If it was in a public park, then at most it might require a minor walk, ideally not even uphill. If it was the sort of tree someone (someone who was not yet a tree-head) might drive by all the time and not really notice, or notice but think simply, “Huh, what a large tree!” — that was perfect.
Hodel thought first of the many streets in L.A. lined with great, glorious tree plantings: the coral trees along San Vicente, the Canary Island date palms lining the entrance to Dodger Stadium, the gum myrtles on Kenilworth Avenue in Pasadena and, of course, in Altadena, the deodar cedars along Christmas Tree Lane (“a spectacular planting,” Hodel said). But when I explained that it was specimens I was after, I heard Hodel go silent a moment. He had his book out too, and was flipping through it. “Some of these trees,” he said quietly, almost to himself, “I haven’t been back to them in 30 years, and they may not be there.”
Hodel then told me about a grapefruit tree in Little Tokyo that was planted about 150 years ago by Japanese American settlers as part of the first citrus grove in Los Angeles. For decades, the tree sat behind a building in a vacant lot, until the neighborhood rallied to save it, and replanted it in the courtyard of the Japanese American Cultural Center. It was by now very likely the oldest citrus in L.A., certainly the only one left from that original grove. “Ask if it’s still standing,” Hodel told me. And, later, I did. Reader, it is.
The 150-year-old grapefruit tree in the courtyard of the Japanese American Cultural Center.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
There were also, of course — Hodel continued — the ficuses; the Moreton Bay figs in particular, which get absolutely gargantuan, and are never not notable, lining as they do La Mesa Drive in Santa Monica, or Vermont Avenue on its approach to Griffith Park, or spreading their branches out over the Pacific Ocean on Point Fermin in San Pedro, or beside the old library in South Pasadena. But one of his favorites — and mine, it turned out — was next to St. John’s Presbyterian Church, on National Boulevard, a few blocks from where the 10 Freeway crosses the 405 Freeway. This one tree takes up practically the whole block, was planted in 1875, and is the sort of specimen that can cause someone to gasp, and gawp, and long to pull over and stand beneath it for a while, just contemplating things like time and space and root systems.
Hodel had given me more than a few great trees but I was a greedy, half-tree-mad man by now. I wanted more: more trees, older trees, even better trees. He mentioned Orcutt Ranch, which, he said, had some of the oldest valley oaks around, and an even older coastal live oak, so old you could still see on it the scars from where its branches had been removed to fire the kilns that made the adobe brick that built the San Fernando Mission. “Lot of history tied up in those old oaks,” Hodel said.
About a week later, I visited the oak, which is a short walk from the parking lot to the back of the property, the last small parcel of a once-sprawling ranch that is now a public park. The tree has the look of an ancient thing — knobby and gnarled and thick, so thick and tall it appeared at times like several oaks stacked on top of one another. A tree like this is practically planetary; it creates its own ecosystem, and while we — photographer Devin Yalkin and I — stood in its silence and stillness for a spell, we also began to notice all the life within it and upon it: We counted at least two beehives, a half dozen squirrels, several California towhees and oak titmouses, many, many lesser goldfinches, huge networks of spiderwebs, plus dark holes and hollows throughout the oak that were certainly home to many more creatures we could not see. This tree, by some estimates, is at least 700 years old, which would make it a likely candidate for the oldest tree in all of L.A.
An excellent Moreton Bay fig tree at Mid-City’s Prescott School.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
Among the oldest trees in Los Angeles, a coastal live oak at Orcutt Ranch.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
But the day was young, and we still had many more trees to see, so after an hour or so, we drove across the San Fernando Valley, up and over the hills to the triangle where Cahuenga crosses Franklin, to an entirely different sort of specimen: a handsome jacaranda, not so incredibly old, not even especially big, just beloved, and beset on all sides by the city. I had heard about this tree from Nick Araya, an arborist who runs TreeCareLA. This tree, he told me, was managed by the surrounding neighborhood; they had a committee for it, even. Last year, Araya had been contacted by the neighborhood tree committee after the jacaranda in the triangle had been mysteriously vandalized. Someone, or something, had pruned a large portion of the tree. “They almost ruined it,” Araya said.
Araya sent his colleague Oscar Sanchez out to investigate, and Sanchez eventually figured out that someone, likely employed by some corporate entity (an advertising agency, perhaps), had illegally chopped the tree just to make a nearby billboard more visible. “Corporate vista pruning,” Sanchez called it. But people, Araya pointed out, obviously care more for trees than they do for billboard advertisements. And indeed, after a short time looking at the jacaranda, a man walking a small dog cautiously approached. His name was Louis Alfaro. The dog was his neighbor’s, and named Nacho. Alfaro was very worried about what we might be doing to the tree — did we work for the city? Was Devin photographing the site to take down the tree? It was one of the few patches of nice green shade, and there was already so much vandalism around it, he said. He’d lived in an apartment in the neighborhood for 11 years and visited the tree almost every day.
Wherever Araya goes in the city, tending trees, he encounters folks like Alfaro, who care deeply for specimens that are not on property they own, that are not their own trees, but they feel an ownership and responsibility for them all the same. Araya also catalogs champion trees — the largest specimens in the state or even the country — wherever his work takes him, which is all across L.A. One of his favorite specimens to send fellow arborists out to is the towering silk floss in back of Yamaguchi Bonsai Nursery on Sawtelle. He’s also particularly fond of a Moreton Bay fig that’s spilling over the muraled retaining wall of Mid-City’s Prescott School.
Among the other L.A. champions in the registry of California Big Trees is the state’s largest avocado tree, in Atwater, as well as the largest Canary Island pine, in Lawndale, and the largest deodar cedar, in Lafayette Square. These are all common trees that can be seen throughout the backyards and supermarket parking lots of Los Angeles. But these individuals have grown old and huge and worth celebrating, even if they happen to be unassuming and unexpected, situated as they are on quiet residential streets.
Dragon trees in downtown L.A.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
The oldest plant in the world of known planting date is the Ficus religiosa Sri Maha Bodhi, which was planted in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, in 288 BC. Today, the bo tree is revered as a symbol for prosperity, happiness, good fortune and long life. (Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
The champion rose gum tree. (Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
Outside of the city’s parks department maintenance yards is another such champion, a rose gum, which is also known as a smooth-barked apple gum. Like many other very large trees in L.A. — the eucalyptuses, the bunya-bunyas, the Moreton Bay figs — it hails from Australia. As Devin and I were taking it in, Leon Boroditsky, the principal forester for the city’s parks department, walked out to meet us. His office is just across the street. What Boroditsky likes about this tree, beyond its pleasantly smooth bark and rosy shade, is that it’s an anonymous tree. That is, we do not know who planted it, or exactly when, or how. It is on a street corner that was once part of Griffith Park, and it’s possible that someone, long ago, simply acquired an interesting sapling of an exotic tree, had no yard in which to plant it, so planted it in what was, back then, the park. And now, here it is: a towering testament to one Angeleno’s long-ago hopes for the city’s future.
Trees are like that, existing as they do on a timescale so different from our own; they connect us to a distant past while also bearing witness to a future we will never live to see. After months spent searching for the greatest trees in L.A., I’ve come to realize that what I believe makes a tree great is not necessarily its size or its age but its ability to keep on living, especially if it has persisted despite prolonged neglect. That a tree, particularly a tree in a tree-poor part of town (of which there are, in L.A., far too many) endures is — well, it’s a very hopeful thing, isn’t it?
Aleppo pine, the tallest pine species that grows in L.A. This one is at the top of a hill overlooking the 5 Freeway and L.A. River in Elysian Park. Someone added a swing.
(Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times)
I suppose this is a roundabout way of explaining why it is that quite a few of what have become my favorite trees in L.A. are not the sort of trees that judges of any tree competitions may necessarily deem great. Many are still quite young, so really what I like about them is their potential, like some of the more than 400 trees planted in and around Skid Row by folks at Industrial District Green; or the still-young coastal live oaks and black walnuts, many planted by North East Trees, which as they grow and fill in will make up a dense microforest in Ascot Hills Park; or many young trees planted throughout city parks in Long Beach, Cerritos, Lakewood and Seal Beach, many rare and cultivated by Hodel for an organization called Southeast Trees.
The other sort of trees I love are the trees that have, despite our best efforts, endured, like a red river gum eucalyptus in West Carson. This tree sat alone for years and years in an old industrial brownfield, the site of a former synthetic rubber factory, putting down its roots in poisoned earth, surrounded by scrap yards. The tree is just about the tallest feature for a mile in any direction, a lighthouse for nature that draws people to it. And now, the eucalyptus is the heart of a soon-to-open park, developed by the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, named Wishing Tree Park. That’s what a great tree can be: a witness, a wish, a beacon — hope. A great tree is the park that got built around the tree, because it held on long enough for enough of us to finally take notice.
Do you have a favorite tree in L.A.? Tell us about it here.
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.”
“She’s like a female Willy Wonka,” Sakief Baron, 36, said about Kendra Austin, 32, after she explained that her personal style had a playful and cartoonish spirit.
Dressed in loose, oversize layers in blue and neutral shades, the couple were walking on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when I noticed them on a Saturday in April. There was a symmetry to their ensembles, so it wasn’t too surprising when she noted that he had influenced her fashion sense.
Before they met, she said, she was “less sure” about her wardrobe choices. “I also have lost 100 pounds in the time we’ve been together,” she added, which she said had helped her to recalibrate her relationship with clothes.
His style has been influenced by hip-hop culture, basketball players like Allen Iverson and his mother’s Finnish background. “I just take all these pieces and then it kind of comes together,” he said.
Both described themselves as multidisciplinary artists; he also has a job at a youth center, mentoring children. “I want to make sure that I look like someone they want to aspire to be every time they see me,” he said.
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