artist standing between a blue and red painting
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery
Meeting art doyen Jeffrey Deitch at his gallery in West Hollywood

Part One: Art & rediscovery in LA

When I was spending a lot of time in LA in the 1990s, there were some areas a visitor would avoid at all costs unless they had to. Three of these were South Central, Downtown, and the web of roads behind the boardwalk at Venice Beach.

I am due to visit all three. Heading to LA mainly for Frieze LA, where I am meeting with our partners at Deutsche Bank Wealth Management, the long-term partners of Frieze, I have added a full California schedule on to the three-day art fair itinerary. LA, from Beverly Hills to South Central, is just the beginning.

Partly this is for sustainability reasons, to minimise future flights, and also because I have not been to California since before the pandemic, and as ever it is home to many of the world’s thought and opinion leaders, some of whom are on my schedule, as well as a thriving art scene in LA itself.

I spent the ten years before the pandemic commuting many times a year to Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as on short haul trips to Europe for Condé Nast, my other alma mater. Meaning I built up a British Airways Gold membership and accompanying dependence. I had not been to the Virgin Clubhouse for years. The feel is as much private club as airline lounge, with the key differentiator of excellent customer service. I had a wonderful chat with a manager at the lounge who was bemoaning her inability to return to her native Hong Kong, and we exchanged tips on restaurants there (hers, mainly). When the chairs, food, and champagne are largely the same, this makes a difference. I silently wish Virgin had short and mid-haul operations to my frequently visited European and former-Soviet destinations.

Editor’s note: LUX paid for its flights to California in full and received no support from any airline.

a man and woman standing on a terrace

We met with Forbes 30 Under 30 curator, Emilia Yin, at the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze LA

Central LA is a grid of warehouses, yards and unmarked buildings. Nowadays, inside some of these there are artists’ studios, the artists driven here from around the Americas and elsewhere by then cheap rents. As ever, the artists move in, hipsters get the vibe and start to gentrify, and the artists are forced to move out. That hasn’t happened yet in central LA, but it will. So I enjoyed the moment of visiting a few studios, buried behind delivery yards and run-down buildings, with real working artists inside them. No cafes, no galleries, no bars. Give it two years. It’s a cert that the property investors are already there.

A friend with homes in LA sends me a WhatsApp suggesting I visit Gjelina, on Abbot Kinney Boulevard behind Venice Beach, for dinner. I last knew this street as needle central, with a few porn and pawn shops thrown in (homophones that go together), in the late 90s. But my friend has taste, and many homes, so I take his advice. The food is vibrant, trim, focussed and beautiful, like the clientele. Like nothing anywhere else.

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The street is now lined with (expensive) independent fashion boutiques and teenage TikTokkers wander around making TikToks. They fit the TikTok profile of being blonde, white and wealthy. The porn and the pawn have now moved and multiplied online, but where have all the junkies gone, I wonder? Elsewhere in Donald Trump’s ‘American Carnage’?

artist standing between a blue and red painting

Ross Caliendo is among numerous artists from around the world who have set up in the warehouses around downtown LA

two men standing side by side

Meeting with ocean conservation icon Jean Michel Cousteau in Santa Barbara

I host some clients at the pre-opening event at Frieze, created by Deutsche Bank, in Michael Jackson‘s former mansion above Beverly Hills. People are happy to be able to meet and mingle after two hard years, which seem to have hit LA hard. There is a sense of anticipation about the fair. People have travelled, and people in LA have prepared. It’s the first major cultural event in the city for two years. Art really can catalyse human change.

At the fair the next day, everyone is waxing lyrical about the lounge. Deutsche Bank’s team have created an indoor-outdoor space with garden and water, a few footsteps from the fair and linked by a private walkway. Many guests comment that it should be permanent. Meetings in the lounge are bound by Chatham House rules, but there are plenty of guests, our own and others, who have come from afar, and are loving both fair and lounge. Bravo to the creators, although the Deutsche Bank lounge at Frieze London, with its creations by Idris Khan and events on ocean conservation, was still the more artistic and focussed. In my view.

I drive to West Hollywood to see Jeffrey Deitch, an art world force since the 1970s. In his private gallery, which is probably three times the size of the Serpentine Gallery museum in London, he has put together a museum-grade show, entitled Luncheon on the Grass. Works from Mickalene Thomas, Jeff Koons, Kehinde Wiley and Paul McCarthy line the walls. I am taken by Tschabalala Self’s response to Édouard Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ in particular. A few of the interpretations are quite explicit.

Which is quite honest, as the idea of a summer lunch on the grass probably brings that out in many people. Any romance aside, I make a mental sketch of my dejeuner sur l’herbe: it would involve rosé champagne from a small producer like Chartogne Taillet and might ask a question of why people enjoying the countryside in my adopted homeland of England are so predominantly white. I decide the reason I like Deitch’s show so much is that it reveals so much about the artists, and how they want to be perceived, or appear to want to be perceived. I will leave the topic there to avoid falling into the trap of the dreaded (and banned in LUX) language of ‘artspeak’.

Deitch tells me it is his busiest day for meetings for years, another sign of what a good art fair can bring to a city.

Maubourne Pool
The Rooftop at the Maybourne Beverly Hills

The next morning, I drop in on a new friend I made at the fair, Emilia Yin, who was introduced to me by a major collector I invited to the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management lounge. I meet her at her Make Room gallery. Also in West Hollywood, it is in a little building behind a car park off the main drag, Melrose Avenue. There is a sense of both Zen and intent inside, and the paintings in her show, by young Brussels-based Italian artist Jacopo Pagin, all sold within days. I buy the last remaining work, an intriguing sketch. I wonder if she is one of the Jeffrey Deitches of the future.

After three days of intense art and meetings, I take a morning swim in the rooftop pool of the Maybourne hotel in Beverly Hills. The Maybourne, grand but laid-back, has a part-city, part-resort vibe and the view from the roof terrace is surprisingly restful. I pick out my favourite mansions in the hills over a green juice.

I have meetings lined up in the afternoon in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Santa Barbara’s main street, State Street, has been pedestrianised at its seafront end and it’s abuzz with cafes, bars, restaurants and an outdoor market. A positive outcome of the pandemic. A little further up the street I meet Jean-Michel Cousteau, octogenarian sage of the oceans, at his offices, which are lined with pictures and souvenirs of his decades in ocean wildlife conservation and filmmaking. There’s a touching picture of him as a small boy with his father Jacques, giving him instructions on how to dive.

Details of our conversation are saved for a major feature in the next issue of LUX, so stay tuned.

Read more: Olivia Muniak’s Guide to the Best Restaurants in Los Angeles

 

Ten minutes’ drive from Santa Barbara is Montecito, the chichi coastal community which plays host to Harry and Meghan, as well as many other members of the world’s rich and famous. It’s supposed to be a low-key place, I am told. I drive past bijou small shops and cafes, created in a faux-rustic style, all perfect. Perfect children walk past holding immaculate ice creams. On the road to the Rosewood Miramar Beach resort, where I am meeting my contact, three police cars, lights on full colour strobe, have formed a triangle, partly blocking the road. As I drive past, I see one individual sitting slumped on the spotless pavement. I wonder what his crime was. Perhaps not owning a Tesla?

My meeting takes place in a wood-panelled drawing room overlooking the beach, with a couple of islands visible in the slash of gold from the setting sun. I feel I am George Clooney in the last scene of a feel-good movie, concluding Bourbon in hand in a highball glass. Except this is the first scene of a (admittedly potentially exciting) business deal, I am not George Clooney, I do not live here, and I am drinking tea.

Back to LA in the dark, the traffic has died down, and I have a calming Margarita in the bar of the Maybourne to prepare me for the drive north the next day.

To be continued

An airport lounge

The Virgin Clubhouse at London Heathrow has a members’ club feel

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Reading time: 11 min
clothes on a rack
clothes on a rackJane Shepherdson is the woman behind the early success of Topshop, the fast fashion behemoth where she served as Chief Brand Officer in the 2000s. After this and her subsequent role as CEO of retailer Whistles, however, Shepherdson found that her complicity in one of the world’s biggest polluting industries was overriding the joy she once found in fashion. Here, the Director of the London Fashion Fund talks to Ella Johnson about her pivot to luxury rental start-up My Wardrobe HQ, and why rental is key to bringing the fun back to fashion

LUX: You are often associated with Topshop’s success as one of the early pioneers of fast fashion.
Jane Shepherdson: I always wanted to be a buyer – to structure and create ranges without actually designing them, and to work closely with designers. I got into Topshop at the very bottom, starting in the accessories department, and moved up to the jersey department, which was the biggest. It was where you could make the biggest impact, because you had responsibility for tens of millions of pounds worth of the company’s money. We travelled an awful lot in those days, and we did not worry about the environmental aspect. It was hard to beat as a lifestyle.

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LUX: When did you start to think about the environmental and social side?
Jane Shepherdson: We started our drive to better understand the supply chain at Topshop in the 1990s. We brought in a team of experts to do it, but Topshop had thousands of suppliers: it was very difficult to start establishing exactly what the supply chain was from the beginning like that.

It wasn’t until I moved to Whistles in 2008 that we really started to address the environmental side of things. We were a small business and we got to know each of our suppliers as well as we could, working with them to improve their practises. But it is still difficult to be completely sure that the factory you’re using is doing everything you expect them to be doing.

Two girls jumping in a field in white dresses

LUX: You are now Chair of fashion rental platform My Wardrobe HQ. What prompted your move to the rental fashion sector?
Jane Shepherdson: I left Whistles in 2016 because I was unsure that running a fashion business was something I could continue to do. I started looking at the possibility of creating a platform to display sustainable fashion, but I realised that I couldn’t find enough credible fashion brands that were sustainable. There is no point in endorsing fashion brands that I don’t think are any good: their practises may be perfect, but if the garment that comes out of the other end comes out as a hair shirt, there is no point doing it.

I had also just come back from a year travelling around America in Airbnb virtually every night. Fifteen years ago, you would never have considered sleeping in a stranger’s bed for the night. Now people are far more relaxed about renting apartments, cars, scooters. Why not fashion?

LUX: How have luxury brands responded to the rental proposition?
Jane Shepherdson: In the beginning, they were slow. They couldn’t see how rental worked within the luxury world, with the feeling of exclusivity. But in the last year we have started to have conversations directly with the luxury players – including Burberry, Liberty London and Harrods – because they are starting to realise that rental is not going away.

Think about it from the designer’s point of view. Most of their catwalk pieces end up just being that – catwalk pieces. The wholesalers don’t buy the avant-garde or brightly coloured pieces because they are too risky. Conversely, it has been proven that people are much more experimental when it comes to what they rent: consumers are much more likely to rent something that is covered in feathers or bright yellow than they are a black dress.

A blonde wearing a pink blazer with green leaves on it

Jane Shepherdson, Chair, My Wardrobe HQ and Director, London Fashion Fund

LUX: Has that been true of your own experience of renting clothes?
Jane Shepherdson: I have spent a lifetime trying to dress myself for events, typically spending £1000 on something that was quite discreet, in navy or black, and assuming that was my sense of style. When I was first introduced to rental, however, the first thing I wore was this floor-length lilac Sharon Wauchob dress that was covered in feathers, with a matching tailored coat. Lisa Armstrong then called me one of the best dressed women of the year – the first time that has ever happened to me! It was completely different to what I had ever worn before, but it felt completely me – because I was allowed to experiment. Rental brings fun back to fashion.

LUX: Can second-hand ever be incorporated into ‘mainstream’ luxury?
Jane Shepherdson: The stigma associated with second-hand clothing is becoming less every single day. Most of our marketing and social media is really based on showing the beautiful, over the top creations that don’t look like they have come from a charity shop and are a bit more glamorous. I hope people will get that feeling and then prefer to rent a few pieces that were beautifully made that made me feel amazing, rather than have a wardrobe of cheap clothing that cost the same and they aren’t going to wear again.

LUX: Some say that rental perpetuates the appetite for newness which drives overconsumption in the first place.
Jane Shepherdson: I think telling people that they can’t do or have something is tantamount to saying to them ‘go on, do it again’. You have to find ways of allowing people to have fun, but in a different way.

Rental isn’t perfect, and I know that. There are plenty of environmental factors that I am still trying to overcome, like ozone cleaning and having to dry clean clothes all the time. But I hope it changes people’s mindset and relationship with fashion. Rental slows you down: you have to plan ahead.

LUX: How important is diversity to My Wardrobe HQ’s offering?
Jane Shepherdson: We want to be accessible to as wide of an audience as possible. That is difficult, though, because the individuals who lend us their wardrobes tend to be in small sizes. It is easier with the clothes we get from brands, because they give us a full size range. But we are continually trying to get a broader selection of clothes on the site.

two girls in yellow and pink dresses lying on the grass

LUX: Is there scope for designers to bring out collections for rental alone?
Jane Shepherdson: We have to think of different ways of doing things. I have had many conversations with [sustainable fashion designer] Patrick McDowell about how designers might do that with deadstock. If rental takes off and we get to some kind of scale, then it would certainly be a business model that designers would be happy to adopt. Think about the difference: designers selling their product to a wholesaler get back about 30% of retail price; if they rent it, they have only got to rent it out two or three times to have made more money than they are going to get from the wholesaler.

Read more: All-access rundown of Ozwald Boateng’s return to London Fashion Week

LUX: In what other ways are you seeing fashion innovate itself?
Jane Shepherdson: I am Director of the London Fashion Fund, which is funded by the Mayor’s office to find environmentally and socially responsible businesses who will be the future of fashion. We are currently looking at one business that is growing cotton hydroponically, which uses 90% less water. There is another which is looking at creating garments that photosynthesise when you wear them. They are alive, since they have these microbes, so instead of putting your jacket in a dark wardrobe, you hang it on the back of the chair in front of the window. They claim that one square metre of the cotton jersey they produce absorbs as much CO2 as a 100-year-old oak tree, and are talking to a high-street retailer about putting a collection together.

It is early days for a lot of these things, but there is so much that is happening that makes me feel optimistic. At least we can mitigate some of the damage. I am so desperate that someone doesn’t come along and say, ‘you can’t have fashion anymore: it is too trivial’. We have got to find ways.

Find out more:

mywardrobehq.com

fashion-district.co.uk

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Reading time: 7 min