Looking for Fashion Retail in an Art Town
Culver City, Calif., is emerging as a destination for art galleries and fine restaurants, but will fashion retail be part of this vibrant place, located more than nine miles west of downtown Los Angeles?
“It’s a wonderful little town for art and restaurants,” said Glenn Laiken, designer/owner of the Alandales menswear boutique and a Culver City business leader. “But it has never been a great retail opportunity. It’s hard to find independent specialty retailers who have $1 million to open a new store. Because that’s what it takes today,” he said.
Despite being the address to only one menswear store—Laiken’s high-end Alandales boutique—and no major womenswear boutiques, the city seems to have many of the right ingredients to support a thriving fashion retail scene.
During the day, affluent film-industry executives drive to the city to work at the sprawling Sony Studios compound, where fashion company Rock & Republic produced runway shows for Mercedes-Benz Los Angeles Fashion Week on Oct. 19, 2005.
On evenings and weekends, artists and well-off young people come to eat at crowded restaurants such as Ford’s Filling Station, shop at the 100,000-square-foot furniture emporium H.D. Buttercup and browse art at galleries such as Blum & Poe.
Yet fashion retail was not the top focus for a significant period of Culver City’s downtown redevelopment during the late 1990s and the first years of this decade, said Laiken, who was vice chairman of the Culver City Chamber of Commerce from 1998 to 2005 and president of the city’s Downtown Business Association during the same period.
Rather, the city’s redevelopment organization gambled on recruiting restaurant entrepreneurs, according to the Alandales owner. They thought fashion retail may not be a good fit for Culver City’s downtown. Culver City’s state of fashion retail might change, thanks to the efforts of novice retailer Gulbin Yavuz. On Jan. 6, she opened a 350-square-foot fashion design boutique, the Indie Collective Gallery for Fashion and Art, at 6039-A Washington Blvd.
She offers her Indie Collective label’s T-shirts, accessories and mod-inspired Magnetic Fields collection. She said many of her customers are the architects and artgallery workers surrounding her boutique.
“It makes me feel like a groundbreaker,” said Yavuz of the lack of fashion boutiques in her neighborhood. She pays $3.75 per square foot for her space, which is east of Culver City’s downtown. To complement her neighboring art businesses, her boutique will be the site of monthly art shows. —Andrew Asch
