Free enterprise

It’s a typical afternoon on Robertson Boulevard. The paparazzi are camped out across from the Ivy, their lenses turned on the sun-speckled outdoor tables to see if any of the wafer-thin girls picking at grilled vegetable salads is worth a shot. After lunch, the photogs follow the trail of miniskirts and flip-flops to Kitson, “a general store for the rich,” as owner Fraser Ross describes it, selling clothing, accessories and gifts. Maybe Halle Berry is trying on a pair of $175 True Religion cords or Paris Hilton is picking up a $38 pink terry cloth makeup bag with “I Love Botox” written across it. If so, a photo of the celebrity with the item could be worth thousands of dollars for the photographer, fashion designer and retailer alike.

At Intuition on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles, sales staff are packing boxes of Minnetonka moccasins to be shipped out--a little piece of Hollywood for Duluth and Des Moines. Owner Jaye Hersh likes to say she put Minnetonka back on the map. This spring, everyone was mad for Miu Miu’s $280 jeweled moccasins, but they sold out within days at Barneys New York and other local stores. Then Hersh spotted a mainstream trend-in-the making while waiting at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf--a woman wearing Minnetonka’s $45 Thunderbirds. “I called Minnetonka, asked them to send me some, got them to celebrities [Drew Barrymore and Kate Hudson], got permission to use their names, got the names to People magazine,” Hersh says. “I sold 1,200 pairs in 12 hours.”

L.A. style has never been a hotter commodity, thanks to a new generation of independent retailers capitalizing on America’s constant craving for all things dusted with Hollywood gilt. Trends are being created here at a pace as frenzied as the celebrity culture--Kabbalah red string bracelets, Disney Vintage shirts, initial bags, Von Dutch trucker hats, Ugg boots, Jelly Kelly handbags and C&C; California layered tees, just to name a few.

There has always been an independent fashion spirit in L.A. untethered to New York’s 7th Avenue, this country’s historical fashion center. Fred Segal nurtured the idea of California casual, opening his first “Jeanbar” on Melrose in 1965. Over the years, the independent boutiques under Segal’s umbrella have launched hundreds of lines, including Hard Candy Cosmetics and Juicy Couture.

Tommy Perse defined the flip side of L.A. style at his store Maxfield, introducing the avant-garde black look to Angelenos in the 1970s and bringing the collections of Giorgio Armani, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons to town in the 1980s. The store now houses one of the world’s largest collections of vintage Hermes and specializes in quirky merchandise that appeals to the store’s rock ‘n’ roll clientele.

Today, the power has spread to such stores as Kitson, Intuition, Lisa Kline and the newer Satine, Scout and Elevator, with their influence reaching (through their websites) far beyond California’s borders.

When buyers come to L.A. for what’s hot, they go to independent retailers to see what designers they’re carrying. Jackie Brander, who co-owns Fred Segal Fun in Santa Monica, says, “They shop my store first so they know what designer showrooms to visit. My store helps dictate what happens in fashion around the states.”

The age of 24/7 celebrity news also has empowered local boutiques, as their star customers’ purchases show up almost instantly across America. Weekly magazines, including People, In Touch, Us Weekly and Star, and the “Today” show and other morning TV programs, have an advantage over traditional monthlies such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with their long lead times. The numbers are huge. People magazine brings new trends and merchandise to 36 million readers more than 52 times a year, whereas Vogue has a monthly readership of 1.2 million.

On a good day, People style director Susan Kaufman looks at more than 10,000 photographs of celebrities on her computer screen. On a bad day, she sees 50,000. “They are transmitted continuously, and I can get 70 images on my screen at the same time,” she says from her New York office. “I’m looking for anything interesting.” That could be a color, a silhouette or a new bag. When she’s not looking at photos for her fashion pages, she and her team are working the phones, talking to L.A. retailers on a weekly basis to ask, “What have you got?”

“Weekly magazines are an outlet for designers who may not get coverage in traditional fashion magazines,” she says. “More than a Gucci shoe or something not everyone can afford, there are items you can find in these stores that celebrities give validity to. They tie into high fashion but they are things anyone can wear.”

Buoyed by their success marketing other labels, some L.A. retailers have started their own designs. At Kitson, Ross designed the St. Tropez Essentials line of terry cloth handbags and cosmetic cases emblazoned with such L.A.-centric witticisms as “I Love Plastic Surgery” that are now sold as far away as Harvey Nichols in London. Ron Herman’s RH Vintage T-shirts, which feature phrases such as “Free City” across the chest, also are sold in several locations internationally. And Brander, who with her business partner has the largest retail space at the Fred Segal Santa Monica complex, was tapped to design the popular Disney Vintage T-shirts and thermals with retro Disney characters on them.

Hollywood’s new fashion muscle came out of red carpet coverage, says Hersh, who has been a trend-watcher since she was a teenager in the late ‘70s and bought cork-soled platform shoes in every color from Tommy Perse’s first store on Santa Monica Boulevard. “Ten years ago, nobody thought to stop on the red carpet and say what they were wearing. But now, a designer’s career is made after someone wears their stuff on the red carpet. Their life changes overnight, and it trickles down to the designer who makes the earrings that Madonna loves.” As a result, store owners in L.A. are acting as de facto publicists fo the designers they favor, arranging celebrity placement and media hits.

Last November, life changed overnight for Daniella Zax and her two sisters, Nina Bush and Myla Fraser, co-owners of the Rabbi’s Daughters line of T-shirts emblazoned with such Yiddish phrases as “Oy Vey” and “Shiksa.” “Jaye [Hersh] saw a story about us in the Beverly Hills Courier and she tracked us down,” Zax recalls. “By promoting us and getting us on her website and into People magazine, she helped explode our line. We went from minimal sales, pounding the pavement and maybe 10 to 20 stores, to $150,000 in sales [after the T-shirts appeared in the magazine] and 100 stores.”

“What is amazing to me is how you see such definite trends in L.A. stores,” People’s Kaufman says. “You will find some bag by a small designer or the new Ugg boot. There is something in the zeitgeist where the store owners are just clued into itemy things. They have the eye and the vision.”

But not every influential retailer in town plays the name game. Satine, a fashion editor favorite that opened last fall on 3rd Street, is owned by lawyer Jeannie Lee. Decorated with girlish flea market finds, it specializes in undiscovered talent such as Tsumori Chisato, a Japanese designer who works with funky textiles and prints. Although Lee says celebrities shop at her store, she won’t give details. “I wouldn’t want someone to know what I bought. Besides, my clients are very fashionable. It’s not like they say, ‘I saw that in People magazine and I have to have it.’ ”

Greg Armas agrees. The Scout co-owner lists Danish streetwear as his latest passion, but the 3rd Street store also stocks up-and-coming L.A. labels Wooden Mustache, We Are Lucid Dreaming and Society For Rational Dress. “I avoid the celebrity thing at all costs. I don’t want this to be a tourist shop,” says the 25-year-old, who worked at an Orange County art gallery before going into retail.

Armas thinks the surge in new boutiques on 3rd Street, which also includes South Willard, shows that L.A. has a maturing designer scene that offers more than just celebrity-driven trends. “I believe the product alone should sell the shop,” he says. “Not the people who shop here.”

Although Scout and similar stores thrive on selling unknown brands and exclusives, boutiques that carry well-known labels are facing stiffer competition as new lines come out. “Everyone is trying to get the line first,” says Ross of Kitson.

His biggest success came courtesy of Halle Berry and a Jam leather initial handbag. “She came in and bought the bag,” he says. “It was black on one side and had an H on the other. As she left, she turned the bag around for the paparazzi to shoot her. People went crazy. We did over $1 million of business” with items with initial logos.

“The vice president of Liz Claiborne said I put his two kids through college because [the company] then knocked it off for the mass market.”

When it came to Juicy Couture’s handbags, Ross, who opened Kitson four years ago, had to play hard ball. “I carried two diaper bags from their new Juicy Kids line last year because they asked me to. But when they introduced their full handbag line for spring, the showroom told me I couldn’t have it because Lisa Kline was carrying it down the street.”

So Ross called the chief executive of Liz Claiborne, Juicy Couture’s parent company. “I made a lot of money for them with the initial bags and I thought it was payback time,” he says. This year, he expects to buy $300,000 of Juicy Couture handbags and accessories.

Ross reads Forbes and other business magazines for clues to the next trend. “Knitting is really big, so we have knitting kits. And we are changing all of our cookbooks to low carb.” He developed a line of $38 tank tops with “Mrs. Timberlake” printed across the chest after he heard his female staff talking about the hunky star. Other celebrity names followed. “The biggest-selling one is ‘Mrs. Pitt.’ Maybe it’s an older, divorced customer. ‘Mrs. Beckham’ is the third-biggest, and when Ben and J. Lo broke up, ‘Mrs. Affleck’ took off.”

Hersh, of Intuition, started her retail career in 1999 when she needed to earn college tuition for her kids after a messy divorce. She found a source for designer clothes and bags and started selling them out of her house at a 20% discount. Because her children were attending Crossroads School, she had a built-in, high-end customer base. But one day, she got a knock on her door from city officials. A neighbor had complained about the traffic. She had 30 days to cease and desist. Still living month to month, as she tells it, Hersh rented a closet-like space near the Westside Pavilion. She named her store Intuition, after the money she hoped to put into tuition. Then she hit on her first big trend.

“The Jelly Kelly changed my life,” she says. “I was in Europe in July and I saw people carrying them on the streets. I knew it was going to be big. So I took a chance and bought a couple thousand before anybody knew about it.” She had so many orders she was forced to launch a website.

“It was like nothing else I’d ever seen,” says Hersh. “It put me on the map as far as being able to set a trend.” Her first piece of press on the bags was from Daily Candy, an e-mail blast that goes to fashion-conscious subscribers. People magazine and the “Today” show followed.

Inuition is still in the same location on a barren stretch of Pico that doesn’t entice shoppers to linger. Hersh jokes that tourists who stop in say, “That’s all there is?” But she sees no need to move. She says 60% of her $5-million annual business is done on the Internet or by phone. Hersh was one of the first retailers to land the new Ugg handbag line for fall, which she says is going to be huge.

“I don’t think the phenomenon of the world wanting to know what the celebrity has will ever go away,” she says. “We got a call from a customer recently who saw an item on Jessica Simpson’s jeans in Us Weekly. She said, ‘I have to have them.’ My saleswoman asked her what size she was and she said, ‘What size is Jessica Simpson?’ ”

Although retailers say they ask for celebrities’ permission to use their names, Troy Nankin, a senior vice president with BWR who represents Selma Blair, Kate Beckinsale, Hilary Swank, Amber Valletta and others, says his clients have been burned.

“I was reading in Us Weekly that one of my clients loves writing her friends notes on such and such stationery, and it was stationery that had been sitting on my desk,” he says. “The actress was in Europe filming and she had never even seen it. There is a culture of it not mattering if it’s true or not. It just feeds the machine.”

As an experiment, Nankin took one of his actress clients to a local boutique, where she briefly touched a pair of shoes. Us Weekly then reported that she had bought them, he says.

But when it came time for Nankin to launch his own beauty line, Nyakio, he went to his clients. “I had relationships with them and I could be truthful. And it has definitely gotten us off to a quick start. We’re in 200 stores after just a year and a half.”