Over dinner in Los Angeles last week, an acquaintance offered that the city’s shopping landscape was a disappointment for women but a mecca for men.
I’m not ready to go there on the first point (I’ve not spent nearly enough time in L.A. to be declarative), but after passing a few days in the city, I’d say she was onto something with the latter argument.
I hadn’t been to L.A. for two years until last week to cover a couple fashion shows. I returned to a city speckled with new or newish stores, many catering to men. At Mohawk General Store, I watched a man on a random Thursday afternoon try on a pair of four-figure shoes from the Row, and at Maxfield (which, OK, isn’t new but has been refreshed), a 20-something guy show off a $5,500 Enfants Riches Déprimés leather jacket to his skeptical friends.
There was something incongruous about sitting through invitation-only fashion shows and watching men buy $2,000 shoes, while the broader conversation in L.A. was focused on homelessness and the lingering effects of the 2025 wildfires. (My trip coincided with the closely watched mayoral election.)
Probably my favorite stop of the week was the Smoking Archive, a compendium of exquisite suits from the ’80s and ’90s that the stylist Nausheen Shah sells out of her Hollywood duplex.
When Shah started the shop a couple of years ago, she sold to men and women. She’s now focusing on men. That’s just where the business is — especially aged Armani, which makes up about 80 percent of her selection. A leather jacket in a perfect shade of cigar-brown and some three-piece suits that could easily have been from the label’s current Archivio collection caught my attention. It did not surprise me that Shah said many clients were visiting design teams of European labels.
Unfortunately, she didn’t want me to take photos of her collection and asked that you email her before showing up. This shop is, after all, in her home.
The talk of the week was that Beams, the revered Japanese retailer, would soon open its first U.S. flagship downtown, not far from Dover Street Market (which still had a line for the Supreme drop on the Thursday I stopped by).
The men’s stores I was already familiar with were either freshly expanded or in the midst of an overhaul. Departamento, the stylists’ favorite downtown store, with its buffet of $1,890 Jil Sander blousons and $615 Martine Rose jeans, had moved to a new capacious space a few blocks north. (Somehow you still have to walk through a coffee shop to find the tucked away entrance.)
As I paid for a gossamer black T-shirt at Lady White Co. in Silver Lake, the employees kept apologizing for the constant hammering going on — the shop was expanding into the space next door.
Mohawk General Store, a few streets away, wrapped its renovation about a year ago. The entrance is now set back off Sunset Boulevard, and the white-walled interior is less cluttered. The selection, too, had inched upscale. A $2,200 Salon C. Lundman blazer greeted me on arrival. Margiela was nearby on the rack. I thumbed past a pair of $1,095 Dries Van Noten loafers with puckered toes.
Kevin Carney, the store’s owner, told me that it wasn’t so much that the client had changed. It was just that men were now willing to spend more on clothes.
Pretty much everything in the store was neutral in tone. Carney joked that you can tell a guy is rich if he’s wearing brown.
I don’t know if I entirely agree, but I got his point. There is a sort of natural fiber elitism in men’s fashion right now. A few doors away at Rare Reserve, a secondhand shop that also rose to the top of my “must visit” list, I overheard the guy behind the counter say, with palpable pride, that the store rarely carried things made from synthetic fibers.
What it did stock was a canny, so-of-the-times mix of established fashion grails (jeans from Helmut Lang and moody Yohji Yamamoto knits) and latter-day Japanese brands. I chuckled as I thumbed past an Auralee half-zip sweater that couldn’t have been more than two years old. Our collective comfort with wanting something good, not just something new, has really altered the shopping landscape. I left the sweater, but I did buy a checkerboard Comme des Garçons T-shirt I’d been hunting for years.
Other things worth knowing about:
The indelible fit of the day
I had to approach Johnny Petrozzino as he was untangling his headphones by the Pacific after the Zegna show. His suit sleeves rolled up to show off the leopard shirt? The collar points going every which way? The hard crop of the pants? Moves you can really nail only if you look as slick as Petrozzino. A hairdresser and actor, he had walked in the show just a few minutes before. So was he a model, I asked. No, Petrozzino said, he just models “when the universe says so.”
