Miscellaneous Definitions — accessories, trims, tools and general fashion terms from Apparel Search
The Fashion District is a design, warehouse, and distribution nexus of the clothing, accessories and fabric industry in Downtown Los Angeles. The Fashion District spans 90 blocks in the downtown area, and within those blocks wholesale showrooms, textile and trim shops, sample makers, contractors and retail stalls operate side by side, making the district a working marketplace where garments are designed, sourced, manufactured nearby and sold to buyers from across the country.
The Fashion District is a design, warehouse, and distribution nexus of the clothing, accessories and fabric industry in Downtown Los Angeles. The Fashion District spans 90 blocks and is the hub of the apparel industry on the West Coast of the United States.
The Fashion District is known to be one of the best places to shop for clothing, accessories, cosmetics and shoes for low prices.
The Fashion District also features Santee Alley, a heavily populated "back alley" shopping path between Maple and Santee Streets, stretching from Olympic Boulevard to Pico Boulevard. This alley is notorious for being home to a large concentration of counterfeiters trying to sell a variety of faux designer goods, ripped DVDs, and other stolen or bootleg items. Similarly, the alley is also known for its illgeal trade in live animals, which has been criticized by animal rights activists as cruel. Despite this, there are also many reputable and honest merchants in the alley.
California Market Center is centrally located in the Fashion District, and similar to the Cooper Building and the New Mart. It is home to the offices of many of Los Angeles' aspiring clothing designers, sellers, and buyers, as well as the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, popularly known as FIDM, in the adjacent South Park neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. Otis College of Art and Design has a satellite campus in the California Market Center.
Learn more about the LA Fashion Industry.
| The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Fashion_District). Some of the links have been modified by Apparel Search. 1/26/08 |
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Most fashion capitals separate their functions: design studios in one neighborhood, wholesale showrooms in another, fabric merchants across town and factories across a border. The Los Angeles Fashion District compresses the entire chain into one downtown grid. Within its 90 blocks, a designer can buy fabric in the morning, have a sample cut and sewn the same week, show the finished line in a wholesale showroom on the same street, and ship the resulting orders from a warehouse around the corner. Textile shops sell fabric by the bolt to manufacturers and by the yard to home sewers; trim and notion suppliers stock the zippers, buttons, elastic and labels that production requires; showroom buildings stack hundreds of wholesale lines floor above floor; and the surrounding streets hold the contractors, pattern makers and service businesses that keep apparel production moving. The district functions as a permanent trade fair that never closes for the season.
The concentration explains itself economically. Wholesale buyers traveling to Los Angeles can work dozens of lines in a day because the lines are neighbors. Small and start-up brands, which cannot support a national sales force, can rent a modest showroom and stand directly in the path of that buyer traffic. Manufacturers gain from the same density in reverse: every input they need, from a specific lace to an emergency contractor, exists within a short drive, so problems that would stop a scattered production chain become same-day errands. Districts like this one — garment districts in the classic sense — arise wherever those mutual advantages outweigh downtown rents, and Los Angeles became the largest such center on the West Coast as the region's apparel manufacturing grew around it.
The district's character is double. Its core is trade: showroom buildings oriented to registered wholesale buyers, market weeks that draw store buyers from across the country, and sample sales that clear lines at season's end. Around that core run some of the most famous retail streets in American bargain shopping, where stalls and small shops sell clothing, accessories and fabrics directly to the public at close to wholesale prices, drawing crowds that make the district a tourist destination as well as a trade address. Fabric retailing bridges the two worlds — the same textile shops serve production buyers with bolts and home sewers with a few yards of the identical cloth.
For the dictionary, the term names a place type as much as a place: a fashion district is a dense urban quarter where design, wholesaling, distribution and supply for the clothing industry concentrate, and the Los Angeles Fashion District is the defining American West Coast example — 90 blocks of downtown Los Angeles in which the clothing, accessories and fabric industries conduct their business in physical proximity, from first sketch and fabric purchase to wholesale order and shipment.
The Fashion District is a design, warehouse, and distribution nexus of the clothing, accessories and fabric industry in Downtown Los Angeles. It spans 90 blocks and concentrates wholesale apparel showrooms, fabric and trim sellers and industry services.
Buyers find wholesale clothing and accessories showrooms, textile shops selling fabric by the roll and by the yard, trim and notions suppliers, and sample rooms and contractors serving apparel production, together with retail shopping areas open to the public.
Much of the district is wholesale and trade-oriented, with showrooms selling to registered buyers, but parts of it — notably the retail alleys and many fabric shops — sell directly to the public, so the district mixes trade and retail trade in the same blocks.