LA Fashion Week — March 2004

In a merger constituting a virtual fashion world summit, the 7th on Sixth organization — producers of Mercedes-Benz and Olympus Fashion Week in New York — and Smashbox Studios, longtime sponsors and advocates of West Coast style, joined forces for the first time in March 2004 to produce the official Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week LA at Smashbox Studios. The week was formally under way by Monday, March 29, 2004.

The result was a week of well-organized events showcasing diverse design talent at one convenient location. Fern Millis and her team knew the runway business; Dean and Davis Factor of Smashbox Studios were plugged into the LA scene — a peaceful fashion armistice at last. Nine show reports make up the March 2004 set, each linked above, and together they cover the main tent, the satellite scene and the season's emerging-designer showcase.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not photographs from these shows.

One Convenient Location

Consolidation was the March 2004 story. Where April 2003 had scattered across downtown hotels, auditoriums and courtyards, the official week now ran under one roof in Culver City: a main tent for the headliners, studio spaces for presentations like Shay Todd's swimwear show at The Lightbox, and the cocktails and snacks that keep a fashion week civilized. For editors and buyers used to sprinting across Los Angeles traffic between shows, a single address changed the week's economics — more shows seen, more orders written, more coverage filed.

The satellite instinct survived anyway, and the coverage follows it: the Mondrian Suites report chases the unofficial scene to the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where microbrands and street-credible labels — the first showing of True Religion among them — exhibited outside the official lineup, and Trina Turk turned her new Third Street flagship store into a theatrical show space of her own.

The Shows Covered

The nine reports map the Los Angeles market of 2004 with unusual completeness. In the main tent, Petro Zillia's Nony Tochterman threaded dandies, flappers and zoot-suit gangsters into one fall collection in front of Paula Abdul and Nikki Hilton. Premium denim — the city's signature category — appears twice: Frankie B.'s low-rise label growing up into silk charmeuse and tweed, and Joe's Jeans, documented in its runway photograph. Swimwear comes from Shay Todd, a surfer-model from Hawaii showing jewel-tone bikinis a season after her GenArt debut.

GenArt itself is here too, presenting three emerging designers — Society for Rational Dress, Madley and Cosa Nostra — in an avant-garde stage set and the neighboring Gallery Ten9Fifty. Louis Verdad, the GenArt alumnus whose suiting had stolen the April 2003 showcase, returns with his own show, and Tyler, Richard Tyler's contemporary diffusion line, closes the set with the season's most polished tailoring. Each report is kept as written, and the season's own summary follows in the record below.

Read as one document, the nine reports also record a professionalizing industry: an official calendar with a single venue, a satellite scene feeding it talent, retailers staging their own theatrical evenings, and a trade press — this section's own team included — filing daily. The March 2004 week is where the Los Angeles experiment stopped being a novelty and became an institution, and the coverage treats it that way.