LAFW: CoLA and the coif
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Los Angeles’ fractured fashion week -- which felt as if it lasted a month by the time it was all over -- finally ended in earnest Saturday night with the second night of shows from newly formed CoLA. (For a review of opening night, click here).
Joyrich was first out of the gate with a runway show at the Lady Liberty Building downtown, and although the show notes gave a nod to 1990s street culture, from where we sat it looked like the designer was borrowing liberally from the more recent seasons at Louis Vuitton -- Sprousian graphics and a riff on the textured checkerboard Damier print in particular.
Brian Lichtenberg’s collection was tribal glamazons gone wild; tall models striding in shaggy fur footwear and horned headdresses that felt like Monty Python’s ‘Knights Who Say Ni’ by way of ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.’ The combination of furs, skintight, body-baring wrappings and towering shag-shoes made for one of the more visually arresting shows of the week.
The hour and a half scheduled between the two shows afforded ample opportunity for people watching, and the denizens of downtown (and their invited guests) certainly didn’t disappoint; sporting bandleader jackets, feathered mullet hair clips, spiky metal headdresses and armor-plate shin guards.
But our favorite signature look of the night was simple, old-school rockabilly swirl; Nelson Aguirre, a 23-year-old Angeleno who works for KISS-FM, showed up sporting a choreographed ‘do worthy of Bob’s Big Boy.
‘I have a little James Dean obsession and a little Elvis thing going on,’ he told us between shows, explaining that he crafts his coif with a mixture of hair glue and Aqua Net. ‘Some days it takes me 15 minutes, some days it takes me 45.’
In a way, Aguirre’s molded mane is a good analogy to this season’s series of fashion-related events. Each show, each designer, each venue and organization grew as an individual hair; each one headed in its own direction. The result? A bad case of bed head. But just spend a little time and effort to craft, tease and shape the various strands in the same direction and the results could be truly impressive.
Now it seems all L.A. Fashion Week needs is someone with that industrial-strength can of Aqua Net.
-- Adam Tschorn