Melrose blooming
The shopping district known as Melrose Heights is not as obvious as label-obsessed Rodeo Drive or as celebrity-greased as the see-and-be-seen Robertson Boulevard. There is no shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic and crowds don’t clamor to get into the stores. In fact, for many a lazy afternoon hour, the leafy sidewalks on Melrose between La Cienega and Fairfax are empty, except for the valet perched on a lawn chair in front of the Marc Jacobs boutique with little more to do than study Star magazine, and a musician strolling along while strumming a guitar.
And yet Melrose Heights has emerged as L.A.’s hottest retail thoroughfare by flying under the radar -- like many of the fashion brands that set up shop here -- and appealing to those in the know. Fred Segal, at Melrose Avenue and Crescent Heights Boulevard, used to be one of the only high-end hubs. But now that the Marc Jacobs, Marni and Tracy Feith boutiques have opened, the area is seriously heating up. A second wave will follow this fall with Diane von Furstenberg, Paul Smith, Tarina Tarantino, Suzanne Felsen, Antik Denim and London-based Temperley opening stores along the stretch.
Don’t expect the kind of pierced-and-tattooed street scene that Melrose is known for east of Fairfax Avenue. Melrose Heights is where the one-of-a-kind vintage look of the Eastside meets the designer chic of Beverly Hills. That means empire-waist tops, skinny Bermuda shorts, boho sandals and bags that aren’t instantly recognizable by their designer, though buying them might still require blowing the rent. The mood on the street is in step with fashion’s new air of discovery -- the feeling that the only way to be stylish in an over-hyped, over-photographed, over-marketed world is to wear something nobody has ever heard of.
Like so much of L.A., Melrose Heights has a behind-the-scenes aura that suggests the person behind that pair of oversized sunglasses could be famous. The appeal of shopping here is not the overt hustle and bustle but the possibility of discovery -- that Kirsten Dunst could walk into Miss Sixty trailed by a phalanx of paparazzi, that Johnny Depp might drop into his office above the Kate Somerville salon or that a wardrobe stylist could pop into Marni exclaiming that she’s there to pull clothes for a shoot with Kate Hudson.
Long a destination for the best-tressed visiting the Sally Hershberger salon, Melrose Place is now home to several high-end clothing boutiques -- if you can find them hidden back in the quaint, European-style piazzas, climbing with hot-pink bougainvillea vines.
“A lot of these places don’t look like they really want you to come in,” said Amy Spach, a writer from Hollywood Hills dressed in a summery skirt while recently shopping on Melrose Place.
Exclusivity is the point, says retailer and designer Delia Seaman, who owned Curve and Vionnet on Robertson Boulevard before opening Delia on Melrose Place earlier this year. Instead of walk-in customers, Seaman relies on word of mouth for traffic to her upstairs boutique.
“Everything is private, and there’s not a ton of signage,” said Seaman, who targets older customers with such hard-to-find lines as Lancetti, Antonio Marras and Future Classics. “There are so many stores and so much commercialism in fashion. Everything is so available that there’s something nice about a small, private street. But you have to have an established customer. The store might be empty sometimes, but then Courteney Cox came in last week.”
Next door, Henry Beguelin sells earthy, handmade Italian shoes for $500 and up. And Joann Smyth is a jeweler who caters to celebrities such as Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz with delicate pearls and stones in unusual colors. For those on a noncelebrity budget, her $50 chain-link rings with single freshwater pearls or semiprecious stones are a hit.
“The trees on this street should really come down,” Smyth says, addressing the issue of bringing in more foot traffic. “But they are part of the charm. This is not a typical retail environment. It’s kind of the anti-mall.” Her biggest complaint is the lack of lunch options for shoppers. Bastide, on the north side of Melrose Place, is only open for dinner. “We really need a Dean & Deluca,” Smyth says, referring to the New York-based chain of gourmet shops.
A few doors down at the Tracy Feith men’s store, a sales associate passes the time reading a magazine on a shag rug. He wears the brightly patterned swim trunks that characterize Feith’s surfer style, with a polo shirt and bare feet. The store is in the same airy building as facialist-of-the-moment Kate Somerville, whose Titan laser “nonsurgical face-lifts” and “Dermal Quench” treatments bring in the likes of Paris Hilton, Jessica Alba and Sharon Stone.
Down the block, the French doors of Feith’s women’s store are left open to the street so the flowing, tropical print dresses can blow in the summer wind. Outside on the courtyard, a tinkling fountain beckons visitors to enter through the side door. A few feet west is RetroSpecs & Co., an optical shop that specializes in restored eyeglass frames from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Santa Maria Novella is also a new kid on the block. The store brings the bath products of the famed 13th century Florentine pharmacy to the West Coast for the first time, including frangipani eau de cologne, iris toothpaste and pomegranate soap.
The most noticeable boutique on Melrose Place is Marni, an ivy-covered town house remodeled by architectural firm Sybarite and Marni’s Milan-based designer Consuelo Castiglioni. The modern space is bathed in sunlight pouring in through giant windows and skylights. Elliptical mirrors, curved, lacquered wood walls and silver metal rods resembling tree branches display Castiglioni’s quirky sack skirts with asymmetrical hems, empire-waist tops, boxy jackets, crystal rope belts, and burlap bags decorated with pompoms and embroidered with birds.
Marni is a label for people who aren’t afraid of an unfinished hem. In short, you have to know what you’re doing. Case in point: On a recent Saturday morning, Farrah Katina, who works in the Maxfield fashion office, was helping her sister Cassandra shop the undulating racks while dressed in a long tunic top, white linen pants, a nubby gray bolero sweater, platform shoes and the perfect blend of cool and indifferent. “You can’t find Marni everywhere,” she said, adding that her hairdresser is next door. “And the street is really quaint and cozy.”
Behind the graffiti-painted window of the Marc by Marc Jacobs store, the shopping is hopping. Nostalgia and irony are the currency at this fun house, where for $1 a Zoltar the Magnificent fortune-telling arcade game dispenses sartorial advice, such as: “Buy new fall boots.” Salespeople run around in skinny neckties, looking like extras from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and gumball machines sell MJ pins and charms.
A metallic-clad trio from Orlando, Fla. -- grandmother, mother and teenage daughter -- descends on the sale shoes piled 10 boxes high on the back wall, while two UCLA students browse tables stocked with such assorted oddities as a $4 talking Bible key chain, a $400 red, white and blue Captain America motorcycle helmet, and a $25.95 hardcover titled “The Hardness Factor.” Marc Jacobs-designed Vans sneakers sell for $85; surfboards painted to look like national flags are $550. (Britain and Brazil are bestsellers.)
Across the street, the higher-end Marc Jacobs store straddles Melrose Avenue and Melrose Place. Though there is a crosswalk at the corner, there is not one directly connecting the two stores, which means well-heeled pedestrians can often be found “Jacobwalking” across traffic.
Inside the main-label boutique, shopping is serious business, judging from the patrons dripping in Hermes jewelry and bags. You don’t leave with a $4 trinket; you leave with a garment bag and a $2,000 credit card receipt you’d rather forget.
Thankfully, the windows lighten the mood. On a recent Saturday, the display had designer-clad mannequins with empty gin bottles and Budweiser cans at their feet, as if they had just spent a night slumming it. Talk about high-low chic.
Head east on Melrose toward Crescent Heights (yes, you’ll want to move the car) and the crowds pick up. Adidas Originals is a haven for sneaker heads, with limited-edition kicks in camouflage prints, sneaker boots (very Missy Elliott), retro-sporty T-shirts and handbags with the brand’s famed stripes. On a recent afternoon, Caesar Yue and Allen Wang, tour guides who live in L.A., couldn’t wait to get their purchases home. They slipped out of their shoes and into their new sneakers in front of the cash desk.
New York transplant Lotta Stensson has been doing the mirrored, sequined tunic and prairie skirt look for years. Now the rest of the world has caught on, but Stensson hasn’t raised her prices. You can still get a pair of chandelier earrings in her shop for $35 and beaded thong sandals for $40.
“When we first opened on this street 5 1/2 years ago, there was Costume National, Betsey Johnson and not much else,” says Mary Ellen Brett, who manages the store. “Now they are springing up like weeds.”
“But the parking,” chimes in George Black, a makeup artist pawing through ethnic-looking jewelry. “I have to keep going back to the meter and feeding it again. You can’t do all of Melrose in under two hours.”
No, you can’t. But there’s free parking at Fred Segal, where you can take a load off at Mauro’s Cafe. No one would guess Hollywood is calorie conscious judging from all the pasta and smoothies consumed at this lunch spot, one of the only eateries along the shopping corridor.
But no one really comes for the food; they come for the scene. This is the fashion equivalent of Schwab’s Drugstore, and at any given time, you might see a guy in a newsboy cap stringing pearls waiting to be discovered by a Fred Segal buyer, or three men on cellphones wearing identical T-shirts spelling out their goods on their sleeves: “Czar Entertainment.”
Just another day on Melrose.
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Haute spots in the Heights
Shops
1. Marni, 8460 Melrose Place, (323) 782-1100. Boho for those with fashion know-how.
2. RetroSpecs & Co., 8458 Melrose Place, (323) 951-0215. Restored eyewear from the 1920s to 1960s.
3. Melrose Alley, 8465 1/2 Melrose Alley, (323) 655-1357. Easy-fitting clothes aimed at the more mature set.
4. Tracy Feith, 8446 Melrose Place, (323) 658-7464. Beachy prints and a tropical breeze. Too bad they don’t serve cocktails.
5. Joann Smyth, 8444 Melrose Place, (323) 951-0635. For girls who love their pearls.
6. Delia, 8438 Melrose Place, (323) 658-8685. Fashion maven Delia Seaman’s third retail outpost for the quietly chic.
7. Henry Beguelin, 8436 Melrose Place, (323) 653-1905. Earthy leather shoes and bags from Italy.
8. Tracy Feith Men, 8428 Melrose Place, (323) 655-1444. A surfin’ safari of hot-pink velvet blazers, floral neckties and swim trunks.
9. Santa Maria Novella, 8411 Melrose Place, (323) 651-3754. The scent of Florence in L.A.
10. Marc by Marc Jacobs, 8410 Melrose Ave., (323) 653-0100. A fun house of fashion at prices you can live with.
11. Marc Jacobs Collection, 8400 Melrose Place, (323) 653-5100. Charge it and don’t look back.
12. Nom (Naissance on Melrose), 8250 Melrose Ave., (323) 653-
8850. Maternity wear you’ll want to keep long after the baby is born.
13. Decadestwo, 8214 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-1960. Gently used goodies from Lucien Pellat-Finet, Dsquared2, Zac Posen and more.
14. Decades, 8214 1/2 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-0223. Vintage king Cameron Silver’s castle.
15. Jonathan Adler, 8125 Melrose Ave., (323) 658-8390. Modern takes on the needlepoint pillow and gourd-shaped pottery.
16. Madison, 8115 Melrose Ave., (323) 651-3662. The L.A. look, including Ugg boots, flip-flops, expensive denim and mirrored peasant skirts.
17. Ron Herman at Fred Segal, 8100 Melrose Ave., (323) 651-4129. Go for the T-shirts, the smoothies and the scene.
18. Miss Sixty, 8070 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-1460. Ciao! Italian street wear.
19. Xin, 8064 Melrose Ave., (323) 653-2188. Well-edited boutique includes Think Handmade shoes from Italy, Mara Hoffman separates and surfboard-shaped earrings.
20. Betsey Johnson, 8050 Melrose Ave., (323) 852-1534. A favorite designer for funky, punky and pink.
21. Miu Miu, 8025 Melrose Ave., (323) 651-0072. Prada’s lower-priced line with surly service.
22. Adidas Originals, 8009 Melrose Ave., (323) 658-6091. Sneaker head hide out.
23. Costume National, 8001 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-8160. Forget Armani and check out Ennio Capasa’s sleek suit separates.
24. Resurrection, 8006 Melrose Ave., (323) 651-5516. The West Coast outpost of the East Village vintage emporium with Pucci, Gucci and more.
25. Lotta Boutique, 7965 Melrose Ave., (323) 852-0520. New York transplant Lotta Stensson was doing peasant skirts and tunic tops before most.
26. Agent Provocateur, 7961 Melrose Ave., (323) 653-0229. Naughty knickers from London.
27. Spirituali, 7928 Melrose Ave., (323) 653-3471. Indian tunic tops, beaded belts and broomstick skirts in a strip-mall setting.
Services
Kate Somerville, 8428 Melrose Place, Suite E, (323) 655-7546. Get Paris Hilton’s complexion here.
Sally Hershberger at John Frieda Salon, 8440 Melrose Place, (323) 653-4040. The best highlights in town for the price of a small car.
To eat and drink
Mauro’s at Fred Segal, 8112 Melrose Ave., (323) 653-2874.
-- Booth Moore
Los Angeles Times
