We are seeing signs of a revival in the fashion industry in LA lately. Its timing couldn’t be more welcome to those businesses, employees, and job seekers who have all been on a Covid-induced hiatus.
“Life is coming back to Downtown Los Angeles,” said Andrew Asch, retail editor for the California Apparel News trade newspaper, who lives and works in Downtown Los Angeles. Paul Smith’s long-awaited boutique opened in Downtown Los Angeles in July, and the outdoor cafes such as Urth and Zinque have been packed through Summer 2020. Throughout the pandemic, work on the fashion district’s sprawling construction projects hasn’t stopped.
However, downtown Los Angeles is still recovering from the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders. The once-bustling streets of Downtown Los Angeles have not yet been restored to their same pace of action. Some downtown storefronts are still boarded up months after rioting took place in downtown May 30. Los Angeles showed signs of solidarity immediately after the riots, Asch said. “Storeowners told me about how many of their neighbors helped them protect their shops and how many people helped them clean-up.”
A busy Los Angeles fitting model, Jody Carlson-Astrom, is back at fittings in Downtown Los Angeles. The support from her husband, family, and friends, keeping up her routines with exercise, and going to work kept her feeling normal during the pandemic. Carlson-Astrom said, “It’s never been if you will get through a situation in life together because you will, but it is how you will get through it together." Many of her regular accounts are opening up fitting schedules for both delayed and forward-deliveries, as she continues to create the needed schedules.
While many companies are back intermittently working in-house, a designer for a major retailer who we spoke with is back at work, choosing to be in the office. Staffing is leaner due to budget cuts and layoffs, and the employees that do WFH/remote now and are very happy about it. They find it to be more productive at home (less meetings and fewer interruptions). The pace and calendar are amping back up to the normal pre-Covid— very busy with the usual deadlines.
Rebecca Marion, senior designer at Planet Blue, continued working through the pandemic, with a real compulsion toward a traditional standard of daily productivity, she recognized the newly open schedule as a unique opportunity to pursue other avenues of growth. Since the industry has been erratic, she took some courses on Coursera and then Logocore in graphic design and branding. “It amounted to many hours of homework, a lot of which was welcome as it was much more hands-on art and in many different mediums than are part of my current creative career,” Marion said.
All in all, we are seeing an uptick in the LA fashion industry. Not only are people looking to get back to work, but companies are making strides to open their businesses and storefronts. Some are beginning to hire additional staff as they move forward. All progress is welcome for an industry that has weathered the storm and is ready to keep the positive momentum rolling.
