‘In’ Wear for the Club Scene : Fashion: There’s no real dress code for L.A. night life. But basic black seems to win an entrance to Vertigo while the Mayan seems to opt more colorful garb.
“Usually I just waltz right in,” said Helen Pegadiotes impatiently as she stood outside the Vertigo club in downtown Los Angeles. But Pegadiotes wasn’t waltzing or doing any kind of dancing last Saturday night as she waited with about 30 other hopeful nightclubbers to be let into the local hot spot.
After a few minutes, the 23-year-old broadcast journalism student from Long Beach, clad in a simple short black dress, caught the eye of the doorman, who lifted the velvet cordon for her and her escort to pass inside, ahead of others who had waited for nearly half an hour.
The apparent selectivity of the Vertigo, and of the nearby Mayan nightclub, has resulted in separate legal actions being brought against the two clubs. On Wednesday the Mayan was found guilty of practicing arbitrary discrimination, which is prohibited under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act. And the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Department is seeking to suspend Vertigo’s liquor license on the same basis.
Neither club has a specific dress code, so no one knows for certain the ins and outs of their admissions policies. From this vagueness sprang the two complaints.
The owner and president of Vertigo, Jim Colachis, maintains that his club reserves the right to extend some patrons preferential treatment over others so long as it does not discriminate on the basis of sex or race.
His staff members, he said, generally look for people who have made an effort to dress up for the night or for those dressed in an “interesting manner.”
“It’s simply a question of, ‘We’re too full (inside) and you seem to have done a better job at looking interesting tonight than the next person,’ ” he explained in a telephone interview.
Technically, “night life attire” is required at the Vertigo, but its definition is fairly fluid. Black seems the color of choice. The doormen look favorably on classically dressed guests, with men in jackets and women in short, sleek dresses, general manager Glyn Samuel said.
“But then you’ll have your people in fashion jeans,” he added. “You know, $200 jeans with holes (in them). And leather jackets and stuff like that. We do shy away from jeans, but if someone wears a pair of jeans right, it can be very fashionable.”
On Saturday night, a fairly smooth stream of people entered the trendy club on Boylston Street. But without any kind of systematic line, it was impossible to tell what rhyme or reason determined who got in first and who had to wait.
By 11 p.m., several knots of people had gathered outside, jockeying for strategic positions in the front of the crowd and anxiously awaiting the doorman’s sign of approval.
Robert Kotel, a 23-year-old Angeleno dressed in black slacks, leather jacket and buttoned-up white shirt, was still hoping for entree although he and two friends had already spent an hour and a half presenting themselves for inspection.
He turned away after being passed over again. “They only let the girls in,” he muttered, clearly disgruntled. But he kept waiting, as did a number of others who didn’t make the first cut.
Most of them took it in stride and in fact seemed to expect no less. “It’s like that all over New York, and the same in Europe,” noted Pegadiotes.
Two miles away on Hill Street, patrons dressed like Kotel were apparently having no trouble getting into the Mayan, despite the accusation of discrimination upheld against the club this week. The flow into the old Mayan Theatre was steady, impeded, it seemed, only when the cashiers had too many people to handle. The wait was minimal, although, like the Vertigo, there was no line of any sort.
A fair scattering of jeans and more colorful clothes was an instant tip-off that any unwritten dress code is less formal than at the Vertigo.
“Here it’s really casual. I don’t know how else to put it,” doorwoman Beverly Reyes said. “Guys come in loud shirts, baggy jeans, really Euro-looking.”
Women wear dresses but with colorful patterns rather than basic black, said Reyes, sporting a soft, fake leopard-skin dress.
“People call up and say, ‘What should we wear? Should we wear black?’ ” she said. “That’s so out. The weirder the better. If you’re out at night, you want to forget about the daytime. . . (so) you might as well dress the part.”
