Lifestyle
The L.A. laundromat offers something special and rare: a home away from home
The laundromat is the perfect place to cry in public.
I’m here now, crying as I type this. I don’t care who sees me. I’m tucked away into one of the two-person benches between the silver three-load washers, tears welling up in my eyes near their tipping point. I make eye contact with a man who passes me by on his way to the sink. He looks slightly concerned. But even if I wasn’t partially hidden it wouldn’t matter. I feel safe here. It’s a place that puts intimacy on a rush order, past the point of faux social etiquette. I’m surrounded by people who see the color of my underwear as I pull it out of the dryer. What are a few tears at this point? We’re already well acquainted.
I’ve always been too internal for my own good. I cry in public often because of what’s happening in my imagination. And the laundromat — its familiar, sterile smell of cleaning products and metal, the constant chugging sound of water and hot air — is a place that feels particularly primed for me to slip into my subconscious mind, like sliding into a comfortable pool of Jell-O. I remember things I forgot. I romanticize the Krypto Villain stickers in the quarter vending machines. I sit and stare at people until it hurts. I fantasize about what their lives are like, or all the times they wore those nice faded jeans that they’re pulling out of the dryer while the static shocks their skin. I see a couple sitting under the food tent outside. Their knees point into each other’s while they’re eating, and by their body language alone I conclude that they are, of course, in love. I see a teenage boy shadow-boxing the washing machine in what I decide by a demeanor that I find all too familiar, is a bid for attention. I’m reminded of when I was 14 and needed attention.
An L.A. laundromat is always open, and always waiting for you.
The dryer whirs soft, the fluffy smell of chemical flora rises, the badass little kids with silver teeth run circles around their mom while she folds their Spiderman T-shirts. An image flashes in my mind of myself when I was small — curly hair, dirty Osirises and the fake tattoos I got from the quarter machine fading on my forearm, using the laundry cart like a bumper car or laying my head on a freshly baked mountain of clothes that was just piled into it from the dryer.
I love the laundromat. I’ll tell anyone who will listen. You will catch me at a party giving what might as well be a PowerPoint presentation about the joys of the laundromat. What most people see as an undesirable chore I see as a comfort zone. My own private version of the club, where fluorescent light floods from the ceiling and there’s always Amy Winehouse or Salt-N-Pepa playing over the loudspeaker. My local laundromat is open 24 hours — as all the good ones are — and any time of day or night, for the rest of my life, I know there is a place that is open and waiting for me (as long as I have a hoodie to wash). I’ve never had an in-unit washer and dryer in my many years of living on my own. And it never mattered. Because I have something rarer, more special: a home away from home.
May wears Marni dress, Fendi pink boots.
Maahleek wears Miu Miu, model’s own jewelry.
There’ve been rumblings on the internet lately about “third places” — spots people go to that are not their house, not their office, but a secret third thing. “These places are vanishing!” the TikTok feed will warn. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place” and expanded on it in his 2001 book, “Celebrating the Third Place.” Oldenburg’s life’s work has been dedicated to explaining why informal gathering spaces matter, and in his writing he defined some characteristics of a true third place, including low barrier to entry, being a status leveler, somewhere that conversations happen and arguably most importantly, being a home away from home. This, Oldenburg writes, is the antidote to isolation, the lubricant of a healthy social balance. “Y’all got nowhere to hangout and it shows,” stated one TikTok creator, who made a series out of suggesting third places.
The experience of the laundromat spills beyond the confines of its walls into its surrounding areas. If you’re doing laundry in a neighborhood like mine, then you’re very lucky, and every single day there is someone selling food on the sidewalk out front. Last time I was there, it was the new-to-me Colombian spot, a Mexican empanada spot and a birria spot that sells it on top of pizza. The smell of soupy, red meat mixing with the unmistakable perfume of Suavitel and Zote shavings. On the weekends in winter, you’ll find the champurrado lady selling Styrofoam cups of the viscous, steaming drink out of the trunk of her minivan.
The parking lot is where all the good things happen. When I was in my early 20s, I used to put my load in and s**** a b**** with my bestie as I waited for the cycle to finish. It’s where I bought someone’s physical mixtape a couple months ago because I’m a recovering people-pleaser, and was in partial system shock from even seeing a physical mixtape. It’s where I can never find parking — even on a weekday evening — because as long as there are days to live there will be laundry to do.
The number of activities done there that have nothing to do with washing your clothes feels specific, in a lot of ways, to L.A. We do all of our photo shoots for our merch brands at laundromats (who among us?), throw experimental punk shows, come up with our best ideas. In my Notes app earlier this year I wrote: “Laundromat culture — places of business and life and love and food.”
I saw a post about a guy who lived in a renovated laundromat in Queens, which felt right to me — something to aspire to. In “The Great Good Place,” Oldenburg writes that third places should inspire the same fuzzy, warm glow of belonging as its inhabitants might find in their own homes. There should be a sense of ownership, of taking up space. I remember this when I Zelle the guy with the Colombian hat $6 for two potato and cheese empanadas. As I sit outside to eat them I notice a parked car with the driver and passenger seats reclined all the way back, two people with their feet up on the dash hold hands as they engage in a romantic, mutual endless scroll on their phones. “That’s beautiful,” I think. We make ourselves at home in places where we need to pass time. We find ways to be comfortable, to turn it into our living room.
Maahleek and May wear Chanel.
When my mom comes to visit me she always takes a load of my laundry to wash at the laundromat I’m at now. (Yes, I’m 29, but her love language is “acts of service,” so sue me.) Every time, she comes back upstairs to my apartment with freshly folded T-shirts (and a blouse she shouldn’t have put in the dryer but did anyway) and regales me with a new story of an hourlong conversation she had with a stranger — the latest in her laundromat saga. I’m more the observant type. The interactions I usually have here are swift, but I still find them deeply meaningful. I notice a lady selling intricate gold-plated rings on one of the tables by the window, the natural light bouncing off the metal tray as the afternoon sun makes its descent. I ask her about them. All of these little moments fill me with the feeling of being human. There is so much talk about a need for connection, a need for community, but no one wants to spend an hour of their week philosophizing intense beauty in the mundane at their local laundromat, do they? That’s what I thought.
An important part of the laundromat experience is the massage chair. It’s the only spot that offers a soft surface to sit inside the actual building, and treating oneself feels right in a place like this. I sit in it long enough before it yells at me to put money in — I never get the actual massage, of course. I get up and relocate to a spot where I can watch the meticulous dance of a big family folding their clothes. They always have, like, 15 kids and 10 loads of laundry — an assembly line that communicates: We ain’t new to this. They quickly take up an entire counter and move with accuracy. I see one family bring a mega Tupperware container filled with hangers, attaching each of their nice button-up shirts like clockwork. It’s hypnotizing. I spot a long chartreuse dress with a flower detail that I would never wear but am deeply intrigued by. In the background, there are moments of intensity that bubble up and dissipate — a rush will be interspersed with serene moments — mimicking the flow of anything else in life.
And as soon as I slipped too deep, I’m jolted back to reality by two women arguing over a dryer, which is a normal interaction here. It went on for 15 minutes, each one of them throwing strays long after the initial confrontation was finished. Draaaaama, I thought. And I laugh to myself. Because that’s what happens when you’re comfortable, when you’re at home, when you’re with your family.
Production: Mere Studios
Models: Maahleek, May Daniels
Makeup: Selena Ruiz
Hair: Adrian Arredondo
Photo Assistant: Dillon Padgett
Styling Assistant: Deirdre Marcial
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.
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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.”
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