Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian friendly, ecologically healthy and global urban hotspot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums and designers and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.
Throughout the book, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written, highly visual and featuring numerous photographs throughout, L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles, its cultural history and modern urban style.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: L.A. Chic: Between Rags and Riches
Urban chic: The becoming of the new Los Angeles
Chapter 1: Freeway vs Downtown
From suburban noir to downtown chic
From the suburbs to loft living, or: Neo-noir in gentrification-land: Veronica Mars – The Movie
Naomi Hirahara: Murder on Bamboo Lane and Grave on Grand Avenue
The subversive need for speed: Fast family, smart L.A. and muscle/cars in Furious 7
A gentler, softer, hipper Los Angeles for the twenty-first century?
Chapter 2: Santée Alley vs Santa Fe: Latinidad between Ramonaland and Latino Grit
Fuego: The new L.A. street style in Santée Alley
The Ramona mythology
Los Angeles and Santa Fe: A tale of two nostalgias
Fashioning latinidad
Chapter 3: L.A.’s Surf Chic: From Drop-Out Culture to Silicon Beach
Beaches, L.A. style
L.A. beaches become chic
Surfer culture
The original beachboys
Let’s go surfing now: Californian lifestyle in the 1950s
Surf globally, resist locally
Silicon surfers
Reading the beaches
Chapter 4: Bling and the Realities of Compton and Calabasas
The Bling Ring
Surfaces and seriality
Faciality
Umwelt – Calabasas
The ins and outs of Compton
Coda: GTA: City without angels
Chapter 5: L.A. Fashion in Museums
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM)
Other fashion-related exhibitions in L.A.
Chapter 6: Los Angelization ą la Tom Ford: From American Gigolo to American Apparel
“Doing a Gucci”
Armani goes to Hollywood
“Doing a Dov”
Conclusion: Learning from Los Angeles, the Josephine Baker of Cities
Works Cited
Filmography
About the author
Susan Ingram is associate professor of humanities at York University.
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