Ritual

Style brokers soak it up from the streets and spread it across the globe. Nowhere is that transaction more apparent than at Ritual, a new Friday nightclub at the Art Deco Park Plaza Hotel west of downtown L.A.

On opening night last week, half a dozen street- and club-wear makers offered their clothes at wholesale prices as trance techno and high-speed hip-hop (known as drum-and-bass) boomed from three large ballrooms.

Most of the labels, from the high-tech A Liquid Affair to the retro Fine, appeared only a step removed from the dance floor, teaming with outlandish club kids who mix secondhand clothes from different eras, like fashion deejays.

Ritual is the brainchild of a group of club-goers, designers and promoters who believe that fashion and music are inextricably fused. Hipsters assemble unique outfits from thrift-store finds, designers emulate those styles, deejays wear the designers’ clothes, and the outside masses ultimately follow their lead.

“I don’t follow any trends,” says club-goer Mikiko Nagao, 28, sporting a floor-length faux fur coat in a leopard print. “I just see something at a thrift store and if I like it, I get it.”

“She’ll take something from the ‘20s and something that shouldn’t be made until the year 2000 and put it together,” says Terry Mussatti, owner of Come to Mama thrift store in Silver Lake, where Nagao shops.

They inhabit the bottom of the fashion food chain, from which the small streetwear labels feed. And the sharks are always circling. Polo Sport, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana and Guess have all copied looks discovered in club land.

“It hurts me to see companies making money off my ideas,” says Atousa, the 25-year-old proprietor of the futuristic A Liquid Affair label. Her glow-in-the-dark T-shirts, for example, feature clear plastic chest pockets--a stash for all the fliers handed to clubbers during a night on the town.

“A lot of the big designers have metallic, reflective lines,” she says. “We were doing it three years ago.”

The backpack, for another example, rose from nightclub accessory (ravers used them to store water and other goodies) to runway staple. Now, the dance floor is introducing deejays’ record bags to the world as kids use them as backpacks. Fine produces boxy bags that it sells as purses.

*

In this sea of style, authenticity slips swiftly away.

“Club clothes are very trendy,” says Guy Brand, a partner in Fine, which peddles ‘70s looks such as baby T-shirts with action-TV images. “It’s a quick thrill.”

So, rather than design looks on a seasonal cycle, “we just think month to month,” he says.

“Fashion is absolutely fast food,” says clubber Jiotta Melissi, 27, dressed in a super short latex cocktail dress and platform boots.

And like the music, the outfits are collages of the past century’s worth of styles, odd mixes of eras (‘70s baby T-shirt with ‘50s hot pants) meant to keep it real. In his book “Style Surfing” (Thames & Hudson, 1996), British fashion writer Ted Polhemus argues that the ‘90s have ushered in a transition from fashion (read: uniforms) to postmodern “style” (read: wear whatever you want, with whatever you want).

“Unlike those who feel and express a consistent commitment to a particular subculture, clubbers delight in promiscuously cruising through all manner of clothing,” Polhemus writes. “ . . . Indeed, anyone seeking an index of the postmodern condition need look no further than the ever growing, ever more influential world of clubbing.”

*

Among this crowd, there is no allegiance to wardrobe.

“I shop at any store that will sell anything used,” says a club promoter who calls himself Woody Wood-Wrecka and wears a tight coat and fedora. (“A ‘90s ska style,” he says.) “Designers try to knock off credibility from people like me. So I never wear the same thing twice.”

“It’s a peacock affair,” says Sam Onyemelukwe, 26, of the body-conscious E-poch label. (“We’re not designers,” he insists, “we’re clubbers.”) “You go to a thrift store and buy a style people haven’t seen for years. Thrift-store buyers are cutting the middle man out.”

While some of the small fashion labels, sold mostly via boutiques, keep an eye on thrift stores, they also tap the music scenes, their costumes (fuzzy pants for ravers, gangsta styles for drum-and-bass “junglists”) and the music itself.

A Liquid Affair’s spaced-out styles reflect the designers’ love of electronic ambient and the psychedelic side of drum-and-bass. Many of these companies--including A Liquid Affair and E-poch--sponsor top international deejays, hoping that dance floors across the world will adopt the looks as well as the music.

Many of the clothing lines, however small, show up in Japan and Europe. And European clothing companies such as the U.K.’s Boxfresh and Mecca Germany adopt L.A. styles.

Of course, grass-roots fashion comes from many sources. The Park Plaza is surrounded by the mean streets of the Westlake district and MacArthur Park, home of the 18th Street gang and the kind of hardened imagery that finds its way onto MTV, even the fashion runways.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the hotel welcomed a new generation of electronic sound to America by hosting some of the nation’s first rave-style clubs, Moonshine and Truth. The riots five years ago put a damper on the club scene as scared suburban kids stopped coming to the inner city to party.

Although Ritual, encompassing three music rooms and a fashion room, didn’t reach its 1,200 capacity Friday night, the Park Plaza appears to be back.

“The blend of the music and fashion worked well,” says promoter Jed Wexler. “The whole idea was to bring as many different kinds of people in one place as possible.”