California Apparel News

For Patrick DiLascia, a Los Angeles designer who was featured on CNBC show “The Profit” in 2017, this year was going to be the time when he introduced a new fashion line called Bridge & Tunnel.

He and business partner Aphrodite Alexandropoulos exhibited the new brand February at Liberty Fairs trade show in Las Vegas. But the COVID-19 pandemic upended their plans. After the trade show, orders for Bridge & Tunnel were put on hold, and DiLascia, Alexandropoulos, as well as most of their colleagues, shelved their 2020 plans and scrambled to chart their next moves.

For DiLascia, a way to move forward was based in his self-named T-shirt brand Patrick. Retailed at Los Angeles-based boutiques such as Kitson and Enda King, the three-year-old Patrick brand developed a niche as a line of comfortable T-shirts and basics bearing humorous slogans and pop-culture graphics.

He took the humor of the Patrick brand, and put it on face masks, with one design stating, ‘If you can read this mask, you’re too close.’”

“It’s humor without being too inappropriate,” Di Lascia said of the masks, which retail for $14 to $16 for the tri-blend material masks. They can be purchased from. https://afroditescloset.com/collections/accessaries. Sales have been good, DiLascia said. In fact, the one silver-lining of the pandemic is that had developed a robust market for face masks and coverings.

He and Alexandropoulos are developing a new line of masks which will be sprayed with an antimicrobial solution before they are sold on the digital channel afroditescloset.com.