A Personal Touch
For persons with disabilities, finding stylish, comfortable and durable clothing can be a frustrating challenge. Many settle for whatever clothes they can rig to fit. Childhood friends Kurt Rieback and Tom Pirruccello met up as adults and started a business, Professional Fit, to help improve clothing options for the disabled.
Following up after a chance sighting of each other on the freeway 15 years ago, the Studio City natives combined their expertise to create Professional Fit, a Burbank-based company that fills the special clothing needs of residents of nursing homes, developmental centers and other care facilities in nearly 30 states. They recently expanded to www.professional fit.com. Rieback, a former swimwear salesman at the California Mart, and Pirruccello, a former administrative assistant at a nursing home, manufacture most of their customized men’s and women’s casual attire and adapt some ready-made clothing to meet the special sizes and needs of clients. Their extensive lineup includes $50 wheelchair capes, $27 elastic-waist cargo pants, $19 Henley shirts and oversized socks that fit over leg casts. The company recently created $15 to $20 bib-like clothing protectors that look like a vest, button-down shirt, or T-shirt, but slip on easily to prevent food stains.
Professional Fit offers a range of personalized services, including custom alterations, such as replacing buttons with easy-to-fasten Velcro, or for people in group settings, free name labels and individual receipts to make accounting easier.
Rieback said that a number of facilities are teaching computer skills by having residents choose their own clothing via the Internet site. “It’s meeting the needs of people who didn’t know this was out there,” said Rieback. Call (800) 422-2348, or e-mail sales@professionalfit.com.
Sumptuous Scents
When Vogue is running pieces on the delights of butter, and spas are serving dessert, perhaps it’s no wonder that some of the most interesting fragrance collections read more like recipes than the usual inflated perfume puffery.
Though food fragrances are nothing new (remember the crazes for eau de vanilla and grapefruit?), Lynette Reed, creator of Illume candles, has set up her expanding Izzy Sayan body scent collection to function like a perfume cookbook--mix lotions and potions, each crafted to complement the key perfume notes--and create your own fragrance, or one of her tasty formulas. Our fave? The “Hot Mama” recipe: Start with one layer of kumquat body creme ($23), add a generous coat of spicy Lola fragrance enhancer lotion ($17), and coat with three spritzes of kumquat eau de parfum ($48). Other flavors of parfums or colognes include cucumber melon, ginger grapefruit, pear clove, pumpkin spice, Mexican hot cocoa, lemon nectarine or even spiked rhubarb.
Healthy--and Hip
This fashionable food thing can go too far. New Yorkers are carrying the new Glaceau Vitamin Water sports drinks as if they’re a fashion accessory! With medicinal labels and a dozen formulas for “energy,” “rescue,” “focus,” and more, the Vitamin Waters are trying, hard, to bottle prestige and designer hypochondria cures into a 20-ounce plastic bottle. Note to the misguided citizens of Gotham: If you want energy, try coffee. It works.
If the Shoe Fits
Italy’s Sergio Rossi shoes are continuing their march across the globe. The footwear maker opened a boutique at 366 N. Rodeo Drive last month, one of 35 Rossi boutiques expected to open worldwide by year’s end. The Beverly Hills store has what others will not--Hollywood stars placing orders in the VIP room.
