Special Events — Los Angeles

This section gathers the special events in Los Angeles that sit alongside the runway seasons: one-off shows, sponsored presentations and fairs that drew the fashion crowd outside the fashion week calendar. Two events make up the section. In March 2005, Paul Magalad's San Paredes was the winner of the sponsored show at Gallery 825, sponsored by the Los Angeles Art Association and Apparel Search during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week LA. In July 2003, the Scope art fair took over two floors of The Standard Hotel Downtown, showing art across beds, in shower stalls and on ceilings.

Each event is linked above and kept as its record: the San Paredes show report with its first press release, and Debra Stevenson's review of Scope Los Angeles. The section is not currently active; the events remain here as the record of what was staged.

The Sponsored Show, March 2005

The San Paredes show was fashion week's sponsored experiment: a juried presentation giving one local designer a prestigious gallery location, funding for advertising and a wider circle of buyers and press. Paul Magalad, long known as the renegade designer of LA's local scene, presented his avant garde collection as an installation at Gallery 825 on Gallery Row — oversized printed collages of his abstract, hand-sewn garments with live models — while a Neiman Marcus buyer received a private showing and a television crew tracked the evening. The first press release for the event is kept with the show report, and the sponsors planned to jury even more design submissions the following season.

Scope Los Angeles, July 2003

Scope was the art world's version of the same impulse: an informal fair, held four times annually in various US cities, where gallery art left the gallery. At The Standard Hotel Downtown from 18 to 21 July 2003, two floors of hotel suites stood with doors flung open, artwork displayed informally across the beds and affixed to ceilings, windows and even hedges. The review carried in this section walks the rooms artist by artist — installations, crewelwork, watercolors, video and a series of metaphoric self-portraits that all but sold out — and closes with the fair's contact list, kept as part of its record.

Finding Fashion Events

For the wider world of fashion events, the online fashion calendar linked below tracks dates across the industry, and the fashion articles and fashion event articles sections carry event coverage as it is published. The runway side of Los Angeles is covered by the LA runway shows section, whose season hubs organize the October 2003, October 2004, March 2005 and October 2005 reviews kept in this archive.

Why One-Off Events Matter

Fashion weeks are calendars; special events are where a city's fashion culture improvises. The sponsored show put a solo designer into a gallery with buyers and cameras that a parking-lot presentation could never draw, and Scope put art into hotel beds rather than white cubes — each an experiment in how work gets seen. Keeping both records in one small section preserves the improvisational half of Los Angeles fashion life in 2003 to 2005, the half that never appeared on any official calendar, and the half from which several of the archive's recurring names — Paul Magalad above all — actually emerged.