Vive l’avant-garde!

Jeremy Scott’s “lifestyle pod” sits parked in the alley adjacent to the 29-year-old fashion designer’s east Melrose studio. Near the pod--that’s Scott-speak for his black 2002 Jeep Liberty, the first automobile he’s ever owned--a man in a cowboy hat sells spiced corn from a cart. A woman loudly scolds a misbehaving dog. Across the road, portable toilets stand sentry in front of dirt mounds and metal fencing.

For this, Scott left Paris, where he was even recognized by cabdrivers?

“L.A. is an inspiring, inspirational, magical city,” says the Kansas City-born and New York City-schooled clothier, his words as unrestrained as his semiannual outre women’s clothing collections. “It’s like no other place. It’s a fantasy world. It’s like dreamland. It’s a paradise on earth.” In other words, anything goes here, and Jeremy Scott likes it that way.

Scott, who is known for his avant-garde women’s clothing, is sitting on a small couch in a back corner of his narrow white-walled studio, which has concrete floors and exposed wood ceiling beams. He curls one of his white, unlaced Nike Air Force high-top basketball sneakers up under his opposite leg. He wears silver jogging pants, white sport socks, a gray T-shirt and a white martial arts jacket. He hasn’t been exercising.

Scott’s handiwork is equally ironic. Having shown 10 largely unconventional collections in Paris, he gained an international reputation for his wild imagination and for the spectacular theatrical elements of his runway shows, which he often concluded by yelling “vive l’avant-garde!”

One of Scott’s recent collections of women’s clothing paid homage to skyscrapers. Another season’s exhibition was based on game shows, complete with household items as prop prizes and fake cash scattered to the crowd. While he has a solid following, he’s also been knocked by the fashion press for a lack of consistency, and his clothes have been panned for being impractical--quite a feat in the anything-goes realm of haute couture.

So now he’s arrived in a city where leading executives can legitimately pass large portions of their careers pondering, say, the size of a giant robot or the color of a sea monster’s scales. Sounds like prime Scott turf.

“L.A. is such a gorgeous city for fashion and people really love fashion here. . . .” Scott says. “Oh, it’s the most futuristic city in the United States, and maybe even the world.”

Scott isn’t the first designer to answer Southern California’s siren call. Bob Mackie, James Galanos and Richard Tyler, to name a few, have made their names as L.A. designers. Perhaps the most memorable was Austria native Rudi Gernreich, who fled the Nazis for L.A. in 1938, and went on to invent the “monokini,” a topless bathing suit made famous in the ‘60s by model Peggy Moffit. (Like Gernreich before him, Scott draws inspiration from Moffit. The two were introduced several years ago at a dinner party given in Scott’s honor by hair-care impresario Vidal Sassoon.)

Unlike Gernreich, Scott--whom even the fickle French embraced and who was the only American designer to be included in the Louvre’s 2002 Couture Superstar exhibition--wasn’t forced out of Europe. He split voluntarily while still in his preternaturally early prime.

Two years ago at the Pacific Design Center, Scott made his L.A. debut, presenting a Spring 2001 collection reminiscent of the nighttime television soap opera “Dynasty.”

Rita Watnick, owner of the prominent Beverly Hills vintage boutique Lily Et Cie, was in the crowd that night. She’s become such a Scott supporter that Rose Apodaca-Jones, the West Coast bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily, calls Watnick the designer’s “fairy godmother.”

Watnick invited Scott back to L.A. to work with her on a charity event, this time putting him up at L’Ermitage and renting him a convertible.

When it came time for Scott to return to Paris after that second stay, the then-expat bawled.

“He drove away from my store, and he had to come back and say ‘bye’ again,” Watnick says. “He was crying, crying, crying, crying. [It was] really cute.”

Scott adds, “I just was insane. I was crying at the airport. I was like a baby. I didn’t want to leave because it felt so right.”

Back in France, Scott pondered his status as an independent designer, wondering in part where he should work and live. He’d been offered jobs in established fashion houses but turned them down.

“Since I’m not in this blown-out company with eyeglasses in every airport, I don’t have to [cede control],” Scott says. “My goal is to forward my vision of creativity to popular, mainstream culture.”

Toward that end, Scott hopes to break through another high-fashion barrier--working with the runway crowd while also doing entertainment industry costume design.

He’s off to a decent start, having scored the gig costuming Madonna’s latest major music video, for the James Bond film “Die Another Day.” Earlier this year, he was selected to costume models for the Andy Warhol Retrospective opening night gala at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Scott also participated in the Otis College of Art and Design’s mentoring program for junior and senior students, for which he asked his senior students to design an outfit from two different time periods. “Getting Scott to participate was just the most miraculous thing on earth,” says Rosemary Brantley, founding chair of the Otis School of Fashion Design.

Scott’s also designed looks for musical acts, including the performance art band Fischerspooner and the randy rapper Peaches. Contemporary and filmmaker Harmony Korine has asked the designer to costume and art-direct his next movie, which is about nuns, and to co-write and co-direct the picture following that.

“I have tons of goals,” Scott says. “I want to win an Oscar.”

But even Scott’s staunchest supporters acknowledge that in the long run, it isn’t easy to please both Hollywood producers and the fashion elite.

“I think it’s very hard,” boutique owner Watnick says. “And I don’t think anybody has ever succeeded at it.”

Still, if Scott fails, it won’t be from a lack of connections.

He remains acquainted with Bjork, for whom he designed a surreal white leather “angel” dress with diaphanous fan-like wings affixed from sleeves to hips. His mentor in Paris was Karl Lagerfeld, who remains a close friend. He calls model Devon Aoki “my muse” and keeps a stylized photograph taken by Lagerfeld of himself and Aoki up on his studio wall. And Sassoon adds, “The more great designers we have here the better. I’m very happy that he decided to come.”

On a chilly Saturday night last month, Scott showed his spring 2003 collection--which made its debut in September at New York fashion week--in Little Toyko at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. Outdoors, a large turnout and a poorly organized check-in scrum left dozens of would-be attendees stranded, peasants-at-the-castle-gate-style, on the wrong side of a lowered museum garage door. Nearby, a security guard told invited guests to halt or face arrest for trespassing.

Indoors, though, on Scott’s runway and among the 300-some admitted designers, stylists and others, all went smoothly.

The works that Scott presented, including hand-painted silk dresses, metallic microdresses and revealing suede beachwear never intended to be worn in water, had received mediocre reviews when they debuted in late September as part of New York City’s Fashion Week. But unlike his cool welcome back east, L.A.’s fashion cognoscenti seemed to get the joke.

Now that Scott’s settling in here, he’s absorbing and incorporating fashion ideas culled from the sun, sand and sea. His current collection has coral and shell shapes and those showy swimsuits built for sunning--a local phenomenon perhaps misunderstood by East Coast critics, who dip in more placid waters.

Soon after the MOCA event, the clothes were shipped to Asia--his biggest market--for sale.

Back in his studio, Scott’s been spending time with his growing library of art, photography and architecture books. He’s also studying up on West Coast fashion history and continues to pursue his interest in science fiction and futurism, making frequent trips downtown to ogle the Bradbury Building and recall his favorite movie, “Blade Runner.”

Scott’s fixated on far lesser-known landmarks as well, such as Bristol Farms in West Hollywood--and for reasons that have nothing to do with how fresh the produce is.

“You go in there and you’re seeing major looks at the grocery store,” Scott says. “People are really done to the nines. I love it. It’s sick.”

The man whose work desk brims with a 3-foot-tall fiberglass bust of himself wearing a thick chain with a dangling pistol emblem and who just finished creating a limited-edition series of Adidas sneakers featuring a pattern of his mug on faux currency clearly isn’t worried about being labeled over-the-top. Scott and L.A. are a natural fit.

“L.A.’s about money and excess and sunlight and sunshine,” he says. “And it’s not a shameless place to display wealth. It isn’t that way in lots of other places.”