Poised squarely on style’s latest fault line

LAST weekend, bored teenagers strolling along Rodeo Drive suddenly stopped in their tracks and stared beneath their feet.

In subterranean gopher holes, mannequins seemed to float like drowned socialite murder victims. Guys dressed in cool jeans snapped photos with their cellphone cameras. Pretty young things in flip-flops stopped chewing their gum long enough to proclaim: “That’s trippy.”

It gets a lot weirder on the inside, honey.

Architects Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren call these places -- Prada’s supersized flagship stores here and in New York and Tokyo -- “epicenters.” In Los Angeles, that’s a word we usually associate with “Northridge” or “Whittier” or that scary ride at Universal Studios.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly the right term for the 24,000-square-foot boutique that opened Friday and was built for a reported $40 million to “redefine contemporary culture.” As a shopping experience, it’s about as disorienting as a 7.2.

Here you are, gaily flipping through mink stoles, $1,200 skirts, belts beaded with watch gears and dresses in an ancient-temple-ruin print when you suddenly encounter a video monitor in the rack. The screen flickers with ersatz headlines about Iraqi hostages, statistics on prison inmates, images of war rubble and fine-art cutouts. I halfway expect to find a black hood on the next hanger.

The place is full of provocative imagery, if you can focus on it instead of the pretty feathered slippers.

March up the single-file shiny metal stairway to reach the airport-themed menswear floor and you pass through an arch built like a metal detector.

As if anyone needs to be reminded that travel isn’t fun or glamorous anymore.

Walls surrounding the $300 men’s shirts are sketched with scientific illustrations. One lists statistics on poverty and unemployment.

Another charts the median duration of erection by age, beginning with adolescence and ending at the years beyond 71. What’s the marketing psychology here? It used to be that fashion just made us anxious about our appearance; now it’s injecting inadequacy all the way to the core of your manhood.

It’s worse down in women’s.

Inside one of only two second-floor dressing rooms, I stomp the metal button marked “Privacy” and the glass walls mist into opacity. Cool. I’m now invisible to outsiders -- except for the one who I fear is secretly filming me from behind. In porn-video graininess, my bare backside appears on the dressing room’s video-monitor “mirror.” Five seconds after an embedded lens catches a pose, it shows up on screen.

Gosh, I need a haircut. And a completely different body.

But then the most disorienting thing of all happens. As I linger in the dressing room, the salesclerks say things I’ve never heard in a designer boutique: “Take your time,” and my new favorite, “You don’t have cankles” (That’s fashion talk for stumpy legs with undefined calves and ankles).

Every time I touch an object, a uniformed sales associate appears. They cheerfully recite the price by memory, check the catalog for other styles, or wait until I try on five whole outfits.

They’re so ... nice, I think, as I sit in the shoe department, where the bench is padded with a translucent gel that evokes the squishiness of a breast implant.

I ask one of the clerks if they have been trained how to be extra nice. She seems startled.

“Y-yes,” she stammers. “But sometimes it comes naturally.”

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Valli Herman can be reached at valli.herman@latimes.com.