High Priest in the World of Hip

I want my girl to have it first.” That is John Eshaya’s mission statement. “Whatever it is--a tube top, a long skirt--she’s going to get it first from me. And I’ll put it together to where the girl feels great in it. When a girl gets dressed and looks together and is fierce. I’m talking about, like, fabulous. Hair together. Face together. Outfit. And because she’s cool enough to come to the store, I want her to be the fiercest bitch out there first. And that’s the whole thing.”

That’s it? Is there no rhyme or reason behind clothing trends? This is Fred Segal, after all, L.A.’s most reliably with-it specialty retailer. And as the buyer of young women’s clothing for the Melrose Avenue boutique, as well as the designer of his own T-shirt line, Eshaya ought to know the whys and wherefores that determine fashion’s Next Big Thing. But he is only concerned with the “youngest, freshest, newest.” Beyond that, he--like the specialty market itself--operates on impulse. The 32-year-old savant caters to a girl who chews up novelty as if it were plankton. “You have to have the next big thing before they even ask for it,” he says. How does he know they’ll like it? “I believe in it,” he answers. “If I like it, then I’m going to sell it to my girl.”

In 15 seconds, he turns down Immagine’s fall line of floral-patterned Italian shirts and dresses. “Too woman. Not young enough,” he pronounces. Sorry.

Next.

Jenisa Washington, a tall, stunning woman, wheels in a rack of apparel by Sold--Grace Jones-ish leather and lambskin one-shoulder tops and dresses, one of which she’s wearing. “Genius,” Eshaya says, zipping from hanger to hanger. “I’ll take this, this and this.” Eshaya grabs a blank sheet of paper and, sitting on the stained blue carpet next to the employee lockers, he writes out an order for $2,800.

Next. Boom. Boom. Boom. Six designers in one hour. A multicolored parade of jeans, camisoles, T-shirts and dresses.

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“No.”

“Genius.”

And, the ultimate endorsement, a delighted “That’s fierce!”

Eshaya doesn’t simply buy off the rack. Often he asks for an alternative color, an extra cargo pocket, a hidden zipper or lower waistline, sketching it as the designer looks on. “Exclusive,” he says, over and over. “That’s all I want.” He also commissions original designs based on clothes he digs up in secondhand stores. Very vintage. But brand spanking new. And only at Fred Segal.

Eshaya’s personal flair, coupled with the passionate certainty of his judgment, make him a darling of the fashionistas. Such is his clout that “a nod from Eshaya,” says Alanna Chaffin, director of communication for the garment district’s CaliforniaMart, “could very well set a designer on a very successful career path.” Witness the quick rise of such Eshaya discoveries as Juicy Ts, Parallel, BCBG and Daryl K into multimillion-dollar operations. In the case of Earl Jeans, he made the buy before owner Suzanne Costas even got in the store’s door. “I was walking up the little sidewalk and he yelled out, ‘Are you Suzanne? Are those your jeans?’ I spun around and he goes, ‘Those are fierce. I’ll take them.’ ” That was in 1995. Today, Earl Jeans grosses about $4.5 million a year.

“The great thing about John is he’ll give anybody an opportunity if he sees talent and potential,” says designer Nick Nova. “Other buyers want to know who you are, who you’ve sold to and things like that.” Nova was just a club kid who made clothes on the side until the night last year at Club Pump that Eshaya noticed a drag queen wearing a Nova creation. “A one-shoulder, long-sleeve white dress,” Eshaya recalls. “I thought it was genius. So I asked him to make it for the store, and we sold it to real girls.”

From these seemingly slapdash origins, Eshaya-sanctioned styles begin the ascent from exclusive boutique to mass-merchandise department store. First the clothes find their way onto the luscious bodies on the sets of “Melrose Place,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Friends” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as well as into the closets of Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Rosanna Arquette, Alanis Morissette, Juliette Lewis, supermodel Helena Christensen and so on. From there, they are spread across the pages of fashion magazines and are copied by countless manufacturers, to be worn by millions of girls around the world.

“It all sort of happens at once in that weird sort of way,” explains Katherine Betts, fashion news director at Vogue. “He’ll pick up on a trend really quickly. Maybe it’s happening on the Paris runways and on the streets of New York, and he interprets it and produces it at a less-expensive cost so that more people can wear it. So, in a way, he is defining the trend.”

Eshaya is “the messenger,” according to Dee Dee Gordon, editor of the Del Mar-based L-Report, a quarterly market-research guide to the world of hip. “He takes what’s very small and obscure and very cool and he delivers it to the masses in a very acceptable, very hip way.”

By the time it materializes in malls, of course, Eshaya has long gone onto something else. “Once the magazines hit, I’ll run it for a little bit,” Eshaya says. “But when more people come, [it’s] ‘Sorry, we don’t have it.’ Because you know what? I’m over it.”

*

He glides through life with the ease of a wardrobe change. John Eshaya was born in Baghdad and lived there until he was 7. “How did that influence me?” he asks rhetorically. “Not at all.” Life there, as far as he recalls, was “just like this.” Iraq? Like L.A.? “We had a great house. It was jamming. No camel action. No turban.” Still, he says, “It was the best time to move out, because it ended up being that whole crazy war and s - - -.”

At age 10, he arrived in Los Angeles (via New York), picking up his vocabulary from the “Clueless” crowd and a sense of style that is everything but. “I was kind of a clothes whore,” he says. “In junior high, I wrote down everything I wore every day so I wouldn’t repeat within the month.” Even today at his Larchmont Village house--a clutter of vintage tchotchkes, Catholic kitsch and thrift store paintings--the hyperkinetic Eshaya redecorates every season. His first loves were the OPs (Ocean Pacific shorts) and ‘70s lightning-bolt T-shirts everyone wore back then--a design he’s bringing back in his own J.E.T line of Ts. In 1984, Eshaya got a part-time job at the now-defunct Quinn’s health-food store on Melrose Avenue. It didn’t last. “I’d wear black back then, all New Wavy, and I’d get hell from the manager. I’d be like: ‘You know what? This is not my speed.’ ” So he walked down to Fred Segal, applied and was hired on the spot. He became the first male salesperson in the young women’s department. Somehow, the clothes whore ascended to clothes heaven.

“I always thought it was the coolest store,” he says. “Remember Gibaud jeans? I saw them on Jennifer Beals in Interview magazine, and I was, like, ‘Cool.’ It said, ‘At Fred Segal’ ” in the photo credits. Over the next four years, Eshaya moved up to assistant manager and finally manager. His segue into buying happened like this: “All of the sudden [a buyer] quit because she wanted to have babies and stuff like that. I remember going to Europe with my friends that summer. You know how people get those Fodor [guidebooks]? We got shopping guides and went only to clothing stores. Now I’ll go see the David thing. But then my biggest thrill, seriously, was to go to the [Jean Paul] Gaultier store.”

Eshaya returned with a sense of purpose. He asked owner Ron Herman for the vacated position. He rose from assistant buyer to buyer to his current title, vice president, his personal passion for new and fresh now translated into a life’s work. “That’s what Fred Segal was known for in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s. I feel like there’s this whole legacy I’m a part of that I have to help continue.”

*

The locus of all this fashion frenzy is Fred Segal, a bazaar-like complex of stores within stores surrounding a restaurant and cappuccino bar--less of an entity and more of an experience. Vogue’s Betts calls it “the place that defines the L.A. look.” And the store rates consistently high on the L Report’s “image meter,” Gordon says, even among hipsters polled in other cities.

Segal, now retired and collecting his rent from Baja, started the Melrose store in 1965. In the ‘70s, he sold the business to nephew Ron Herman, Eshaya’s boss. Herman says he owns “the entire corner and the upstairs all the way to the restaurant.” He also owns Ron Herman in Brentwood, where Eshaya is also a buyer. Neither has anything to do with the Santa Monica Fred Segal. “It’s a scene,” says Betts of the Melrose location. “Celebrities shop there. You can have lunch there. There’s always these people that are just shopping, and they get drawn into the scene and they end up buying a lot.”

Eshaya taps into this mystique to sell to his girl. “The whole idea of my buying is you don’t just put the clothes out. You’ve got to do a display. You’ve got to do an energy. So when someone’s looking at it, they get the whole feeling.” One room has a few corrugated-metal rectangles nailed to the wall. “When you’re in here, you feel this ‘80s vibe. It’s edgier looking. There’s high-energy dance music all the time.” He points to a rack of Pauline and Melanie Apple glitter-striped shirts. “Very Pat Benatar,” he says. “You wear that with dark denim, tight jeans. Or with a jean skirt, which is very ‘80s, very high school.”

In another room, a few pictures of such jazz legends as Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie convey that the Katayone Adeli tuxedo pants will give his girl “a cleaner, classic . . . kind of like Audrey Hepburn look.”

Here, Eshaya happens upon “Party of Five” star Jennifer Love Hewitt. He helps her mix and match capri pants with sweaters and tops. Forty minutes later, Love Hewitt exits laden with red, white and blue Fred Segal shopping bags and a St. Vincent dress on hold. “You can see, it’s in and out, you like it, you buy it,” he says. “You put her together, and when she’s out there, she feels hot. And when ‘that girl’ feels hot, I’ve done my job.”

Just who exactly is “that girl”? “Good body, very hip, has money,” is how one CaliforniaMart assistant rep describes her. If she isn’t affluent, Eshaya says, “she hooks it up. She needs that skirt and that skirt’s $200? She will get that $200. Her dad might pay for it. She might work a week for it. She does whatever she needs to do. If she’s fierce enough to have that skirt, she wants it, I love her.”

She’s also young. How young? “There are girls that shop at my store who are--seriously?--14 years old,” Eshaya says. Generally, though, “she’s about 20 to 38.” Her group, Gordon says, drives the market. “They shop more. They spend more money on clothing.” Not only that, but everyone tends to copy them. “They are like innovators unto their own. They are kids who are influential in their own areas of the market,” Gordon says.

And quite often, they’re more than influential. They’re on TV.

“This is an environment where celebrities can feel comfortable,” says Ron Herman. When Geri “Ginger” Haliwell drives up, trailed by two paparazzi-filled minivans, store security immediately intercepts the photographers so that the former Spice Girl can shop unmolested. “Celebrities and other influential people start wearing the product, and they’re seen--people take pictures of them and put them on television, and then the rest of the United States sees it,” Gordon explains. The magazine InStyle, for example, has built a circulation of 1 million by tapping into the public’s insatiable curiosity for what Hollywood’s latest it-girls are wearing. Says Herman, “We don’t advertise. They carry the message a lot farther than we ever could.”

Except what is the point if Eshaya yanks the clothes before that style message reaches its widest audience? “The payoff is something not quite so tangible as how many dollars did you reap and how many units did you sell,” Herman explains. “Everyone is wearing pedal pushers. Everyone is wearing short pants. Great. Where did they see it first? They will never forget that.” The buzz keeps the girl coming back to Fred Segal, where Eshaya will once again dazzle her with something even newer, even fresher.

But Eshaya isn’t the only one trying to turn “that girl” into “my girl.” So the battle for every heart and body can become, literally, fierce. And behind the kissy-kiss facade that garmentos like to project, resentment burbles among L.A.’s small specialty retailers about Eshaya’s mania for exclusivity. “Eshaya cut me out of lines that we are both interested in because he has the power to do so,” says Lisa Kline, owner of the Lisa Kline boutique on Robertson Boulevard. “He gets very angry. He says [to the designer], if you sell to Lisa Kline, Fred Segal won’t buy your line anymore.”

Mark Goldstein, owner of Madison, also on Robertson, says he’s had confirmed-in-writing garment orders canceled because of pressure on designers from Fred Segal. “I respect Fred Segal as an entity,” he says, “but not the way they use their power in the marketplace. I think it’s a sign of insecurity to use a powerful name to abuse others.”

Eshaya denies he would try to monopolize a designer. (“No way! That would be rude.”) But he says he does get up-front exclusivity agreements on specific items.

Kline and Goldstein are reluctant to go into detail, but they list the names of other, smaller L.A. boutiques that have had similar experiences. These include NYSE (New York Style Exchange), where the story is slightly different. Owner Julie Zamaryonov says Eshaya loosened his hold on coveted designers once NYSE had something he wanted. “My [former] partner Pauline makes the best jeans in the business,” she says. “Before that we were having the problem, but then he wanted the pants. We said, ‘Of course.’ He’s been supportive ever since.” And so, by fighting fierce tactics with even fiercer jeans, Zamaryonov cut herself in for a bigger slice of girl pie.

For the rest of the pack, there’s not much to do about it anyway. “Who has the time or money to fight something like that?” Kline says. Besides, she says, “there’s a million lines out. there.” By next season, the once-hot collections will have probably fizzled and the game will begin all over again. And for Eshaya, pleasing this girl comes as easily as making dinner plans. “We’ll always have something new for her,” he promises. “Every day. Because you know what? I want something new every day. That’s how it is with clothes. I’ll see it and then I’ll get bored of it, and I’ll want something else. That’s why I’m in the right profession.”