Fashion : A Tony Crowd Haunts Weekend Flea Markets

Los Angeles’ most unlikely new scene happens to be a circuit of flea markets. So much so that devotees actually compare it to the roving, after-hours nightclubs they used to frequent.

Count the fashion crowd in on this. Designers, retailers, photographers, hair and makeup artists are out there in full force, rummaging through the trash and treasures Sunday mornings at 6 a.m.

Tops Most Lists

The Rose Bowl swap meet tops most fashion aficionados’ lists, followed by flea markets at the Long Beach Veterans Stadium, Pasadena City College, the Elks Lodge in Pasadena and the Culver City Auditorium, where the Federico Antique Show and Sale is set. Market days are set to fill a calendar month, and regulars rove from one to the next on a continuous circuit.

Early birds and extra-late-night night owls do best with the 6 a.m. start time at the Rose Bowl sale. Others appreciate the fact that most markets open later--8 a.m. or as late as 10 a.m. Admission fees, if charged, range from $2.50 to $10.

While the fashion community makes a strong presence on these dawn patrols, they don’t dress as if this was a fashion show. In order to be there the instant the sale begins, most people throw on whatever’s closest to their bed--last night’s T-shirt and socks, sweats and athletic shoes.

The Rumpled Look

Even New York designer Isaac Mizrahi, who hit the Rose Bowl sale during a recent visit here, turned up looking rumpled. When Paris-based designer Patrick Kelly scours the Bowl, he wears his trademark high-top sneakers and denim overalls. Kelly actually times his trips to Los Angeles around the sale.

Hard-core shoppers pile into their Range Rovers without so much as food or drink to energize them. While much of the year it’s still pitch black when they arrive, nearly everyone is disguised behind dark glasses. As retailer Madeleine Gallay puts it: “Sleep is dripping” from your eyes. “You’re dying, it’s early, some people are in their pajamas, and you run into the whole world.”

Never mind. The stalwart claim Sunday mornings as their time to sift through makeshift stalls on a perpetual search for beauty and inspiration, however dusty or battered the form in which it may appear.

Odd furniture. Old clothes. Outdated wooden sporting equipment. The truly skilled keep their eyes poised to recognize the aesthetically perfect in a pile of junk.

Like many converts, photographer Steve Danelian, whose work has appeared in Interview, L.A. Style and Rolling Stone, kept hearing about the Rose Bowl flea market from “the fashion photography clique,” before he decided to see it for himself.

Danelian says it took him a while to get motivated. After all, rising at dawn isn’t his idea of fun, “considering I wake up around 9:30 during the week.” But about five months ago, he set the alarm.

“You get a feel of history and of substance,” he finds, now that he and his girlfriend, designer and photo stylist Lydia Ivancevic, search together for odd props they can use for their photography sessions. “Everything made today is sort of processed and has no soul, but when you walk through the flea market, it’s like you’re in your grandparents’ house,” Danelian says. “It’s a very cozy feeling.”

His first purchase was a pair of old, wire-rim glasses, which he had fitted with tinted lenses. But his favorite find is a vintage Royal typewriter. It doesn’t work, but it reminds him of an “old Einstein, an old intellect.”

Gallay got started a year and a half ago when she opened her Sunset Plaza shop, called Madeleine Gallay, and sought quirky, eye-catching display pieces and decorations for her mostly European designer clothing and accessories.

By now, many of the items in her home and almost every decorative piece in her shop are from a local flea market, she says. “I started at the Rose Bowl, and then I got seriously addicted,” says Gallay. Among her acquisitions are candelabra, wicker furniture, a Victorian mantle piece she had gilded and uses as a bathroom mirror and Victorian white linens for her bed.

The “score of my life,” she boasts, was a set of six antique wooden heads to display hats on. Gorgeous. “I got them all for $90, and I later saw one in New York for $250.”

One morning, she bumped into her gardener at a swap meet. He had his own booth, filled with bargains.

“The swaps are not about finding something priceless,” she explains. “They’re about finding very personal things. I’ve got a weakness for weird things.”

Hat designer Mary-Rea McDonald says since she started making the flea market scene six months ago at the urging of an old boyfriend, she finds ideas for her work there. “I like to look at furniture details--cord, trim, buttons on a chair, tassels. The old detailing of furniture is similar to fashion. I’ll see an old upholstery fabric and think it would look good on a hat,” she says.

Even the most battered hats excite her. Recently McDonald purchased a high-crowned fake leopard design, for which she paid $8, because it reminded her so much of a “Lacroix block,” she says, referring to Paris design rage Christian Lacroix. She is going to copy it line for line and include it in her next collection.

Sportswear designer Nancy Heller has been frequenting flea markets in Los Angeles, across the East Coast and Europe “all my career life,” or since she opened her business 18 years ago. She discovers old fabrics to duplicate, garments to copy and details, such as buttons, to study. “You see an old jacket and reproduce the pocket,” she says. “Or take the beadwork off a sleeve and put it on a jacket. That’s what designers do.”

Lisa Norris Eisner, West Coast editor of Vogue, believes her flea market visits are indispensable to her work. “They’re so inspiring,” she says emphatically. Eisner first discovered the markets as a source of ideas five years ago when she was a design assistant to Ralph Lauren in New York. “It was part of my job to go out and find inspirational clothes or fabric or jewelry.”

Now Eisner buys clothes for herself, including old handbags, jodhpurs and cowboy boots, as well as things for her home, such as Mexican furniture, Catalina pottery and “cowboy dishes.”

Likewise, Heller’s search for clothes expanded into a hunt for decorative pieces for her home: Bauer dishes, Manhattanware glass, Bakelite flatware, sterling silver napkin rings and bud vases, carpets, chairs and lamps. “I’m just interested in stuff. I’m a scavenger,” she says.

After making her first visit to the Rose Bowl a few months ago, art dealer Liz Blackman of Outside-In found a new sideline for herself. Looking in a shoe box, she saw two sterling silver cowboy charms from the ‘30s or ‘40s--a moveable spur and a saddle. She went to other markets the next week and the next and kept finding more charms, including an Indian head, a longhorn and her favorite, a silver papoose, for which she has paid from $1 to $35.

Now Blackman is designing pins, bracelets and necklaces made from groupings of her antique charms that she sells privately. She has also found original antique molds from which the charms were made. She also makes jewelry using the molds, and sells it at Geary’s Beverly Hills, Umbrello in West Hollywood, Hemisphere in Santa Monica and the Museum of Natural History shop in Los Angeles. “Southwest is on its last dying leg, but the West will always be in,” she says.

All serious scavengers have a method to their madness. Blackman believes dressing down enhances her bargaining power. “If you’re all dressed up, who’s going to believe you need to barter?”

Most agree that arriving early is paramount. Says Gallay: “It’s gotten to be an obsession and a frenzy to be out the door at 7 to get there at 7:30, and I’m not an early-morning person.”

But Margo and Mark Werts, owners of the American Rage Cie shop, don’t think time of arrival matters. “No, no, no. It should be enjoyable,” says Margo, who usually arrives at the Rose Bowl at 9 or 10 a.m.

“Everybody has different taste and is looking for something different,” she says. In the Wertses’ case, they’re on the lookout for window display pieces, such as old wooden skis, which they will feature later this year. “I think ski pants are going to be big this winter,” she says.

Some people, including Eisner, travel in packs. “We have our little clubs,” she says. “All women, a screenwriter, two producers. And we always meet more people when we arrive.”

Others travel alone. “I dislike groups immensely,” McDonald says. “Everyone’s on a different wave length. Some people panic and like to get through it in a hurry. I’m an independent person. I start at one end and trust the fact that if something is there for me, I’ll find it.”

Heller has refined her system to a fine point. She is always accompanied by her personal secretary-”major-domo” Pam Trickett. When Heller finishes “dealing” with a vendor over an item, Trickett pays and waits for it to get wrapped so Heller can move on. “You’ve got to do it fast,” she explains. “After the first three hours of a show the good things are gone.”

Fashion Aficionados’ Preferred List:

Rose Bowl Flea Market, Pasadena Rose Bowl, 1001 Rose Bowl Drive, $10 from 6 to 9 a.m., $4 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Next scheduled for Aug 13.

Long Beach Flea Market, Long Beach Veterans Memorial Stadium, 5000 Lew Davis Drive, 8 a.m.-3 p.m., $3. Next scheduled for Aug. 20.

Pasadena City College Flea Market, 1570 E. Colorado Blvd, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Free. Next scheduled for Aug. 6.

Pasadena Antiques Market at the Pasadena Elks Lodge, 400 W. Colorado Blvd, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., admission $2.50. Next scheduled for Aug. 27.

Federico Antique Show and Sale, Culver City Auditorium, 4117 Overland Ave, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., $2.50. Next scheduled for Aug. 20.