Lifestyle

Want the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of holiday decorations? Call this L.A. team — and pay up to $50,000

Published

8 months ago

October 21, 2025

Want the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of holiday decorations? Call this L.A. team — and pay up to ,000

It’s Monday afternoon in Madison Heights, a stately Pasadena neighborhood where the seasonal decor is as tasteful and predictable as a Hallmark movie.

Suddenly, like a strange wind, a U-Haul truck quietly pulls in front of an elegant home. Within minutes, a crew of black-clad workers begin emptying the truck’s contents, briskly lining the sidewalk with piles of leering jack-o-lanterns, disassembled gargoyles, bags of shredded rags and a line of gaping brown “skellys” in floozy gowns.

Dr. Halloween has arrived.

Chris Bryant and his wife, Jasmine, are big fans of Halloween and have hired the Dr. Halloween crew to give their yard a spooky makeover. Here’s a before photo of their Pasadena home.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Skeleton figures are laid out a front lawn before being staged.

In less than three hours, Dr. Halloween and his crew of eight will transform the broad front yard of this Fillmore Street home into a riotous Halloween fun house. It’s an annual tradition that Chris and Jasmine Bryant inherited when they bought their spacious home in 2018, and they were happy to continue after they moved in, with the help of the crew who creates a different spooky scene every year.

The job sounds fun, but this crew is all business, cranking giant bony fingers into the ground, styling the wayward hair of ghoulish girls, impaling skeletons — “skellys” — on tall garden rebar so they can be posed and wrestling with the assembly of a towering mummy, gruesome green witch and headless horseman on a rearing stead.

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They rarely talk and never stop moving, and amid them all is Dr. Halloween himself — Bob Pranga (a.k.a. Dr. Christmas after Oct. 31) — directing what goes where. Pranga, 63, claims he’s mostly a watcher these days, because he’s been decorating ritzy homes for the holidays since 1989. Also, his crew members are all pros, but really, he’s just as busy as the others, unconsciously pushing back the bangs of his blond, boy-band hair every few minutes as he rushes from the street to the yard, scrutinizing the effects, deciding the best orientation for the creatures, and sending crew members scurrying to assist another in need.

His longtime friend and business partner, Debi Staron, 67, quietly bustles around in a button-front Santa shirt (“We do Christmas too, so why not?”), pulling spooky accessories and body parts out of boxes so they can be assembled and placed. Her well-worn cycling gloves allow a peek at her perfect dripping-blood manicure, and a bulky knee pad helps steady a problem leg because she’s up and down so often.

PIsrael Cruz completes a stack of jack-o-lanterns.

A man in dark navy T-shirt and jeans assembles a giant warty-faced witch grasping a chain of skulls.

“I’m basically the nuts-and-bolts partner, especially when we do Christmas,” she says. “When we started, Bob was the one decorating inside the lovely house, and I’d be outside on a ladder in the driving rain, trying to hang lights in the bougainvillea. I also know how to fluff a tree properly after it comes out of a box. Most people just put up their artificial tree and wonder why it doesn’t look as good as it did at the store. They don’t realize you have to fluff out the branches — it usually takes at least an hour.”

Staron doesn’t linger long to talk. She makes sure all the crew keep hydrated, and then she’s back trying to install a brighter light in a giant plastic cauldron. Meanwhile, Pranga is all nervous energy.

A headless horseman looms above headstones and mouthy skeletons, big and small.

“I’ve been doing this home so long, maybe I’m losing track,” he says, casting a critical eye at the headless horseman rearing above him. “I think it’s different this year? Did we have him before?”

“No, no,” his client Jasmine Bryant reassures him, pulling out her phone to show photos of last year’s underwater-themed display of ghostly divers, flirty mermaid skeletons and adorable baby shark “skellys.” “And before that, “ she says enthusiastically, “we had the creepy babies …”

“Oh yeah,” Pranga says, brightening. “We had a baby riding a giant spider! That was great.”

The Bryants aren’t the only ones smiling by the time the last strips of white and purple tulle are wrapped around the mummy and the giant warty witch is securely tied against a tree. Shortly after the work begins, pedestrians stop to admire and passing cars slow to a crawl, with cellphones poking out the windows for photos.

“And so it starts,” Pranga says, rolling his eyes, but clearly, this is attention he enjoys.

A blond-haired man in a black shirt grins in front of pretend tomb stones and a skeleton in a witch hat and satin dress.

It may not be the audience he expected when he moved to New York City to become an actor in 1984, but he and Staron’s work creating holiday fantasies for well-heeled clients has nonetheless resulted in tons of applause as the “Tree Stylists to the Stars,” from regular appearances on local TV shows, decorating homes, hotels and TV/movie sets for everything, from “Elf” to “The Brady Bunch”; creating their own book, “Christmas Style,” in 2004; and 10 years later, their own TLC Christmas special, “Deck the Halls with Dr. Christmas.”

It’s not like any of this was planned, Pranga says. He was just a Midwestern boy from Sturgis, Mich., (“Not the famous one with the motorcycles — we’re the other one”) who fell in love with the idea of Hollywood and all its celebrities by watching TV shows as a child in the 1960s and 1970s.

“We were basically middle class so there weren’t a lot of big to-dos throughout the year, but Christmas was always a big deal,” he says, “Christmas by the pound. My grandparents always had a big Christmas Eve party and the weekend before there was always the American Legion Christmas party. We always had a giant blue spruce in the living room that my sister and I got to decorate. And on Christmas morning, we took forever to open presents because we didn’t want Christmas to be over. “

At Hope College in Holland, Mich., he studied theater and got an internship in New York City the summer before his senior year. Typically, theater interns swept stages, he says, “but I told them I wanted to work with a network, so I was assigned to work with Lorne Michaels on ‘Saturday Night Live.’”

A blond man stands behind a taller woman who's dressing a line of gaping skeletons in satin dresses and witch hats.

A skeleton in a lacy black shawl rests its hands on a woman's waist while the woman holds the skelly upright.

His job mostly involved getting coffee and running errands, but the experience was everything a celebrity seeker could ask for, he says. Many years later, he actually decorated the homes of some of the celebs he met on “SNL,” such as Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds. His most memorable moment though, he says, was accidentally walking into the dressing room of “SNL” cast member Gilda Radner while she was sitting inside.

“The rules were, if the celebrities were in the room, you couldn’t go in, and I was terrified,” he says, “but she said, ‘Honey, sit down and have some fruit. I have this big fruit basket and I can’t eat it all myself. You look tired, and you’ve got to take care of yourself in this business because otherwise, it will kill you.’”

He says he hesitated, worried about breaking the rule, but Radner insisted. “She said, ‘If you have any problems with them, tell them I asked you to help me, because after all, honey, I’m the star,’” Pranga says. “She wasn’t being egotistical. It was very businesslike, a moment of power, and I was like, ‘I want to have that power.’”

The following year, after he finished his degree, Pranga moved to New York with $100 in his pocket. One of his friends found an apartment “in a crack-whore neighborhood called Red Hook in Brooklyn. It’s gentrified now, but then, you walked over junkies in the morning to get to the bus,” he says. “People always ask me, ‘Weren’t you scared?’ and the answer is: ‘No, because I was in New York and I was starting this great adventure’ — I was trying to figure out how to be an actor.”

Vicky Dimitri, a blond smiling woman dressed all in black, fixes a black veil on a ghostly apparition.

As it turned out, the acting gigs were rare, but at least it’s how he met Staron, another aspiring actor who, like him, was attending Bob Collier’s Commercial Acting School. To pay the rent, he found work at Macy’s famous flagship department store working in various departments until he finally landed on the Christmas floor, finishing trees.

In the 1980 and ’90s, Macy’s was so prestigious “when I’d go home for Christmas, all people wanted was a Macy’s shopping bag,” he says. During his five years in New York, he worked other jobs too: window dressing at Bergdorf Goodman and leading tours around the city.

“It was all survival work, but being a city tour guide also taught me to hustle,” he says. “Hustle has a negative connotation, but it helped me figure things out. My foundation came from the Midwest, where you work hard, learn how to be nice to people and be happy with what you get. Being a New York City tour guide taught me how to survive.”

Debi Staron displays her blood dripping Halloween nails.

By the end of 1988, Pranga and Staron were ready for a change. As he recalls, “She came to my Christmas party and said, ‘I’m thinking of moving to California in April,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll go with you.’ And that’s pretty much how my life has been, all just happenstance. Nothing was planned.”

They found a small apartment in West Hollywood in the spring of 1989, which they shared with another friend to keep their costs low. “I came to L.A. with $300, so I felt like I was making progress,” Pranga says jokingly. Within weeks, he was working again as a tour guide, this time on tour buses in Hollywood. “I was literally making everything up,” and it became another kind of survival job, he says, since he had to keep changing tour companies until he found one whose paychecks would reliably clear.

Then in the fall of 1991, Pranga spotted a want ad for a Christmas shop manager at the Glendale Galleria.

“I called and said, ‘I have experience at Macy’s doing Christmas,’ and they literally gave me the job sight unseen over the phone because experience at Macy’s had so much clout,” he says. “Then I told them I had an assistant I worked with, and they hired us both over the phone. So I went home that night and told Debi, ‘I got this job over the phone to run a Christmas store, and you’re my assistant. Do you wanna?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I’ll help you,’ and that’s how it started.”

A man on a ladder wraps strips of purple and white fabric around a tall mummy while another man in black walks away.

Things really started humming when businesswoman Bette L. Smith, then-owner of Completion Bond Co., walked into the store. “She said, ‘I love that Christmas tree’ and asked me if I knew anybody who decorates. ‘I do,’ I said, and that was my first job,” Pranga says. “I had no clue what that meant other than bringing a Christmas tree to put up for her. There were no guidelines to being a Christmas decorator in Los Angeles. I had to make everything up.”

Later, Pranga and Staron worked for a Christmas store that was bought by Paris Hilton’s mother, Kathy Hilton, who opened the door to many other celebrity introductions. “I remember Kathy pulling me aside the very first year and saying, ‘Honey, if you want to make it in this town, you watch me,’” he says. “I will always be grateful because I learned so much working for her.”

By then, Pranga was calling himself “the Christmas Guy.” That changed after he told someone he worked 24/7 during the holidays, “and they said, ‘Oh, like a doctor? You’re like a doctor of Christmas!’ So then I started calling myself Dr. Christmas,” he says.

A woman in a navy and green jacket and a man in a pink T-shirt stand next to a tower of evil jack-o-lanterns.

As his clientele grew, Pranga says he knew “if you want to make any money in California, you have to have a little bit of fandom, which meant getting on television, so I just started calling around. Nobody told me I needed an agent.”

It was part luck and part chutzpah that landed him a spot on the “Leeza” syndicated talk show. “I just called and said, “This is Dr. Christmas and I’d like to speak to Leeza Gibbons,‘” he says. “The receptionist thought I was her real doctor and put me right through. Leeza said, ‘Who is this?’ and I said, ‘I’m Dr. Christmas and I think it would be fun to be on your show,’ and she went, ‘… OK,’ and that developed into a lasting friendship. She always called me when she needed a holiday fluff piece.”

Ultimately, he and Staron collected so much holiday decor, they opened a prop rental business called Dr. Christmas Rents in Burbank and began decorating sets for movies, TV and commercials. Around 2015, they noticed all the interest in Halloween and branched into spooky decor as well.

Now their season runs from mid-September to mid-January. For some clients, that means taking down their Halloween gear and putting up Christmas the same week.

His fees vary from $5,000 to $50,000, depending on the location and amount of decor. “Some people even do their bathrooms — I had one house where we put a lit Christmas tree in a beautiful glass shower stall. I’m more than happy to decorate whatever room they want to do,” he says.

He never quotes prices over the phone. “I meet with people and ask what kind of experience do they want — a Honda, a Lexus or a Rolls-Royce? “ he says. “They never choose the Honda experience. The majority of the folks choose the Lexus, and a lot choose the Rolls-Royce, but each client is different. We have a lot of corporate clients, but we also have people who want to have their home done while they go shopping. And what really sells it is, once we give them the movie-set experience, we come back and take it all down. And if it needs any maintenance, we come back and make it right. It’s all part of my Midwestern ideals.”

A cyclist ogles a yard fully decorated with Halloween witches, skeletons, ghouls and gruesome jack-o-lanterns.

Chris and Jasmine Bryant — he a software engineer, she the director of Caltech’s Center for Teaching, Learning, & Outreach — were cheerfully mum about what their Halloween extravaganza cost. “A decent amount,” Chris Bryant says, smiling.

They keep things simple for Christmas — just a string of lights around the outside of the house, but their Halloween decor “goes into our annual budget because it’s so much fun,” Chris Bryant says. “We probably got 2,000 trick-or-treaters last year, an endless stream. It seems to make people very happy, and that’s something we enjoy. It’s a big part of why we do this.”

Those kind of comments are music to Pranga’s ears, a win-win for his business and his Midwestern “be nice to folks” ideals. His goal is always to make people happy, he says, even with a client load that, after Halloween, will likely have he and his team decorating at least one house or business every day until Dec. 25. But don’t let that stop you from calling, he says, laughing. He’s the doctor, after all, a master at making things work, “and I’ll keep taking money until I fall down.”

Lifestyle

Firings at CBS’ ’60 Minutes’ reflect the fight for media control in the age of Trump

Published

3 hours ago

June 3, 2026

Press Room

Firings at CBS’ ’60 Minutes’ reflect the fight for media control in the age of Trump

Correspondents of CBS’ 60 Minutes pose for a portrait in 2023. From left to right, they are Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper. Former Executive Producer Bill Owens sits on the far right. Only Wertheim, Whitaker and Stahl remain at the program.

CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS

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CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS

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When CBS fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday night, the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, told Pelley it was for insubordination at a staff meeting the day before.

The veteran correspondent argues he was defending the DNA of 60 Minutes and the integrity of its journalism.

The battle royale over the network’s most prestigious and profitable news program is part of a broader fight over the direction of CBS News.

And given CBS’s acquisition by a billionaire family whose business interests have become intertwined with the political interests of President Trump, it reflects a larger war over control of the media in the current moment.

Meet the billionaires who control your media

That father and son, Larry and David Ellison, bought CBS’ parent company, Paramount, last summer. In January, they became co-owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Now they’re seeking approval from Trump’s regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.

A glamorous show shorn, for now, of most its stars

CBS fired Cecilia Vega, a correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the executive producer, from 60 Minutes last week. They are shown in this photo at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C.

Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety

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Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety

But the specifics of this individual episode matter — for 60 Minutes, CBS, its audience of millions, and even the news business itself.

The program has been the most glamorous post in broadcast news. The correspondents are the stars of the show. And now, there are just three of them.

Anderson Cooper left last month, concerned over the direction of the network’s coverage. Last week was a virtual bloodbath: correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. So were a producer and two show executives — including Tanya Simon, a longtime staffer who had stepped up as executive producer when her predecessor resigned in protest before the Ellisons’ takeover.

Since the 1960s, the federal government has gathered demographic data from employers as part of its efforts to root out discrimination in employment.

With Pelley’s ouster, only correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim remain. Now they are considering whether to resign, according to two associates with knowledge.

Their brand-new boss, Bilton, was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair. He executive-produced a documentary for Netflix about a couple accused of laundering Bitcoin and has been a producer on several other films.

Notably, he has no experience in television news.

Neither does Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison installed as the network’s editor in chief last October. The Ellisons also bought her center-right views-and-news site, The Free Press.

She has maintained that the network of Walter Cronkite needs a makeover for the digital moment. She has also contended for years that CBS, along with the rest of mainstream media, is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel, and too woke.

A rejection of CBS News executives’ overtures

The new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, has been a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker, but lacks experience in broadcast news.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Bilton attempted to set a conciliatory tone at Monday’s meeting — his first with the show. Pelley, a formidable veteran correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor, wasn’t having it.

Pelley called Bilton unwelcome and unqualified. And Pelley said that Weiss was attempting to “murder” the program.

In firing Pelley on Tuesday, Bilton said the journalist had hijacked the meeting and rejected overtures to work constructively through their differences. (NPR obtained a copy of the firing notice.) Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show came through loud and clear.”

In his own statement late Tuesday evening, shared with NPR, Pelley accused CBS’s new news leadership of killing 60 Minutes‘ DNA and pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”

The accusations, to which CBS has not yet responded, echo those made by Alfonsi and Vega, the two correspondents fired last week.

Earlier this year, Alfonsi publicly complained after Weiss held one of her stories at the last minute, and kept it frozen for weeks, demanding an on-camera interview with a Trump White House official that never played out. It ran, unchanged from the intended version, with additional statements from the administration tacked on to the end.

After being fired, Vega said in a statement obtained by NPR that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”

“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both censorship and self-driven” Vega continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”

Weiss previously rejected Alfonsi’s and Vega’s allegations. (CBS said Vega’s claims, for example, were “not based in reality” while expressing appreciation for her work.)

Weiss and Bilton say digital threat requires a 60 Minutes overhaul now

In a meeting this morning, Weiss said that Pelley chose his own path — that is, to be fired rather than to find a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees. The network and Weiss have not yet publicly addressed Pelley’s accusations of interference.

Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s traditions, its accomplishments and its legacy of enterprise reporting, extended interviews and visual storytelling. It rose in the ratings 9% over the past season under Simon.

The two news leaders say, however, 60 Minutes needs to be overhauled before it becomes increasingly irrelevant in the era of streamers and other sources of news, information and entertainment in the digital age.

Interviews with 12 current and former CBS News staffers, from producers to executives, suggest great reservations and suspicions remain about Weiss’ judgment and her ability to handle the prominent and even famous journalists on whom her division relies.

Weiss had initially sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, dropping a two-anchor format that had sagged in the ratings. Cooper turned down Weiss’ overtures to anchor it and left the network altogether, concerned about her approach, according to associates. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because Cooper has not chosen to speak publicly on the matter.)

David Ellison became chairman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, after buying it last year.

Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America

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Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America

The ratings have continued to sag under new anchor Tony Dokoupil. And some CBS journalists, including producers who have left the Evening News, have publicly accused Weiss of making editorial decisions driven by politics. She has rejected those claims.

The decision to take on overhauling two key shows — one listing, one highly profitable, both high profile — carries significant risks for Weiss and the network, even apart from other considerations.

But the Ellisons’ presence cannot be ignored.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert during Thursday night's finale.

When Shari Redstone was negotiating the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to the Ellisons’ Skydance Media last year, the network announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. He had been one of the president’s most biting and acerbic critics.

David Ellison also made a series of concessions directly to Trump’s chief broadcast regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, gutting CBS’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and appointing a conservative ombudsman to field complaints of bias against its news reporting.

Carr and other regulators approved the Paramount deal last summer.

The accommodations echo those made by other media titans.

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos remade the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which he owns, into a far more hospitable zone for Trump at the outset of his second term. So did Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a noted medical device inventor. Amazon and Blue Origin have multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government. Soon-Shiong’s medical research firm routinely has patent applications up for review with federal regulators. One was approved Tuesday.

The Ellisons are hoping to win approval from federal regulators next month for their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at more than $110 billion. It would include Warner Bros. Studio, HBO and CNN, among other properties.

As Weiss routs CBS News’ old guard, the question of what role she might play at CNN — and what changes that portends at CBS — hangs over journalists at the two networks. The fate of 60 Minutes serves as a high-stakes case study for both.

Lifestyle

We’re having a main character summer. Are you? : It’s Been a Minute

Published

14 hours ago

June 3, 2026

Press Room

We’re having a main character summer. Are you? : It’s Been a Minute

Are you ready for a whirlwind summer romance?Making plans to capitalize on summer can get overwhelming – from finding the right spot to hang or feeling comfortable in your clothes in the sweltering summer heat. So what does it mean to approach summer with a romantic joie de vivre? Brittany is joined by Carly Olson, freelance journalist covering architecture and business, and Garrett Schlichte, writer and chef, to walk us through how to have a rom-com summer where you’re the star.Want more on how to be the best version of yourself? Check out these episodes:How to make friends & get good gossipIt only takes 30 minutes to be a good momSupport Public Media. Join NPR Plus.Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluseFor handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.

Lifestyle

Vintage-obsessed millennial parents are driving L.A.’s booming kids’ clothing resale market

Published

14 hours ago

June 3, 2026

Press Room

Vintage-obsessed millennial parents are driving L.A.’s booming kids’ clothing resale market

Kids’ vintage clothing sales are experiencing a remarkable boom at in-person markets and online, where prices for clothes for little ones have shot up on websites including Depop and Poshmark. Millennial parents are looking to outfit their kids in the clothes and TV and film characters they loved (or coveted) when they were kids.

The result? There’s a new generation of kiddos hitting the playground looking incredibly cool. Take Amari Case, a SoCal toddler who spent a Sunday afternoon this spring ambling around a vintage market in a West Hollywood warehouse clad in baggy jeans and a ’90s-era tee emblazoned with the “Dragon Ball Z” character Son Goku.

When she wasn’t scribbling on a Lorax coloring sheet, she’d been cruising around the market with her dad, Aaron Munoz Case, snapping up new pieces destined to make her the flyest kid at the preschool playground.

Neil Wright, from left, Kristine Nite Scalzo and Brandon Rosenblatt, co-founders of Elemeno Kids Vintage Market.

Showing off Amari’s new vintage satin L.A. Raiders jacket and tiny teal Grant Hill Detroit Pistons jersey, Munoz Case, who was also impeccably dressed, noted that while Amari went through a phase at about 18 months where she wanted to dress herself, eventually she gave up and went back to letting her dripped-out dad dictate her wardrobe.

Munoz Case found Amari’s first vintage piece at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and got the bug, going back every month to pick up something to add to his little’s wardrobe.

Trendspotters and researchers say Munoz Case isn’t alone in his quest. The market for kids’ vintage clothing has heated up precipitously over the last few years, perhaps hitting a boiling point in January when an Eeyore romper from the ’90s sold for over $3,000 on EBay. (It was new with tags, but one without tags still went for almost a grand about a month later.)

The thirst for tiny throwbacks is so popular that first-ever, all-kids market Elemeno — named after the “L-M-N-O” bit of “The Alphabet Song” and where Amari was toddling and shopping — drew 17 vendors and over 2,000 attendees over a single weekend in March. (There are plans for another Elemeno Kids Vintage Market pop-up later this year in New York, as well as plans to bring the event back to L.A. sometime next year.)

2 A child wearing an Avirex jacket from the ’90s.

1. Cameron Scalzo, wearing a vintage McDonald’s T-shirt from the ‘90s, and mom Kristine Nite Scalzo. 2. Cameron Scalzo rocks an Avirex jacket from the ‘90s.

Eye Speak Vintage’s Kristine Nite Scalzo, who co-organized the event and is opening an all-kids vintage store in Pasadena this month, says she fell under the kids vintage spell in 2020 when she was pregnant with her son. She’d always been a vintage shopper for herself, so she knew she wanted to pass the passion down to the next generation. She started filling up her son’s closet, and soon enough, she found herself selling her other finds out of a bodega in her garage.

She has a by-appointment space in Pasadena now, where she draws everyone from Rihanna’s stylist to out-of-town moms who make a point to stop by on their way to Disneyland. “The community around kids vintage has really skyrocketed on Instagram over the past six years,” Scalzo says. “We want to know who we’re buying from. We want to know that we’re doing good with buying secondhand. And it’s a hobby for people that can turn into a possible business on the side. Because knowing there’s a big group that’s interested in vintage kids clothes, you can always pass an item [your kid outgrows] to someone else or resell it.”

Scalzo says some parents are out digging through bins at the Goodwill Outlet looking for the perfect piece, while others are content to pay up for, say, a ’90s Simpsons T-shirt or a mini-size Harley-Davidson jacket. Scouring the racks at the Elemeno market, most pieces cost $15 to $40, though there were special pieces pulled to the side in some booths with price tags that could make a parent’s eyes pop. (Think $275 for a set of well-worn Spider-Man overalls from the ’00s or $150 for a pair of Cross Colours denim shorts from the ’90s.)

In kids and adult vintage alike, mint condition is highly valued. No matter the era in which they were raised, kids tend to be messy. They get strawberry juice on their shirts or scuff up the knees on their Bugle Boy jeans. Vintage kids clothes that look pristine are more expensive, and while plain kids clothes do sell, items with characters on them or cool prints tend to draw more attention and dollars.

Brandon Rosenblatt, another of the Elemeno organizers, says he’s had his eye on a specific kids “Back to the Future” shirt for some time, but notes that it typically sells for about $1,000. He’s partial to McKids clothes for his daughter, from McDonald’s short-lived kids clothing brand, noting that he’s even snagged her a vintage official McDonald’s-themed aloha shirt from Hawaii, something he says he’s never seen anywhere else.

1 Siblings Amora and Milo Castilo wear vintage cowboy hats, jackets and chaps.

2 Thalia Castilo and her kids Amora and Milo.

1. Siblings Amora and Milo Castilo wear vintage cowboy hats, jackets and chaps. 2. Thalia Castilo and her kids Amora and Milo.

Other collectors, he says, might be a little less obscure, leaning into mainstream characters such as Strawberry Shortcake or from ’80s and ’90s properties including “The Land Before Time” and “Rugrats.”

“A lot of millennials are having kids — like everyone who’s in their 30s and 40s — and they all want to put their kids in the same IP they grew up in,” Rosenblatt says.

“It’s the thrill of the hunt that gets everyone so excited,” Scalzo says. “Once you find that perfect nostalgic piece, you’re like ‘Holy s—,’ and you just want to chase that feeling again and again.”

Mia De La Rosa, a reseller who was at the Elemeno market, says that like Scalzo, she started buying kids vintage clothes when she was pregnant with her daughter, Liv, who’s 6 now, very into everything on PBS Kids and has a closet full of thrifted vintage garb covered in characters such as D.W., the annoying little sister from the ’90s show “Arthur.”

Everything Liv wears is “completely her style,” De La Rosa says. “She dresses herself every day and she gets compliments on what she’s wearing at school all the time.”

Other vintage-wearing kids — and in particular younger ones — might simply be sporting what their parents like or might just like the look of the shirt even if they don’t know what it’s advertising. (An 8-year-old boy at the Elemeno market, for instance, chose to wear a pristine T-shirt highlighting the ’90s Jim Carrey movie “The Mask” because it featured his favorite color: green.)

Derrick Broaster, a vintage enthusiast turned full-time reseller, says that while he chooses to put himself in clothes from the ’60s and ’70s, he outfits his two sons in clothes from the 2000s. (“How Bow Wow used to dress when he was a kid,” he says.)

Although his younger son tends to rebel against Broaster’s vintage picks, opting for whatever Spider-Man shoes happen to be in his eyeline, his older son has leaned in, letting his dad advise him on what vintage pieces could work and what would be the most stylish.

1 Brothers pose for a portrait wearing vintage clothing.

2 A family poses for a portrait wearing vintage clothing.

1. Julian, left, and Javier Gutierrez show off their vintage clothing. Javier says his mom always tells him to keep his vintage outfits clean. 2. Mom Priscilla Guzman, clockwise, Dad Javier Gutierrez and sons Julian and Javier Gutierrez enjoy the vibe of vintage clothing. Guzman says she’s been buying and selling kids’ vintage since her oldest son was born eight years ago.

Rosenblatt says a good portion of what vintage finds he sees in the market now has returned to the U.S. from places in Central America and South America or Asia where those pieces were likely sent decades ago after they were donated or given away.

“There’s a real underbelly of this vintage game with rag houses getting access to bulk product overseas and letting people sort through it,” he says. “There are companies now that rip through 20, 30 or 40,000 pieces of vintage clothing a week. It’s a really interesting ecosystem.”

For many kids vintage sellers, finding their stock is just as fun and interesting as getting it back into consumers’ hands. “Anywhere we can find clothes, we’re there,” says Matthew Carlos, owner of Long Gone Youth. He started selling vintage clothes 11 years ago, when he was 15, switched to kids vintage at 20 and has spent the last six years scouring flea markets, websites and swap meets.

“The kids market is definitely growing,” he says, “but I still feel like we haven’t even gotten close to where we can go. It’s just getting popular now, but the more events [like Elemeno] we can do, the more it’ll go mainstream.” Even now, some major brands like Gap and OshKosh B’gosh have recognized the interest in some of their styles from the ’80s and ’90s, moving to re-release the looks in limited runs.

Jackie and Frank Oropeza with daughter Rumi Mae shop at Elemeno Kids Vintage Market.

Kids resale is also leaning into streetwear culture. Rosenblatt, who worked in the streetwear industry, says that he’s noticed that a good portion of those interested in kids vintage — particularly, male shoppers — tend to be fans of streetwear brands like Supreme, Fear of God Essentials and Bape. At Elemeno, for instance, a good portion of the parents we saw pushing strollers were well-dressed dads seemingly on solo missions, something you don’t always see at kid-centric events.

“I just want my son to feel like I did as a kid,” said Justin Nguyen, while watching his toddler, Jayden, play with bubbles. “I want him to be happy, carefree and joyful, and I want to be able to spend time with him. My mom and dad were always working, even on the weekends. Now that I’m a dad, taking my son out on weekends to do stuff like this just seems like a blessing.”