LOS ANGELES — Whenever I wonder whether it is possible to truly understand Los Angeles, particularly its relationship to fashion and style, I think about a shirt. The shirt is a nothing: red plaid, relaxed fit, snap-front closure. It resembles a million similar shirts you can find at places like Filson ($175) and H&M ($11). And yet it is exactly the right nothing, especially for a certain segment of this town.
By this I mean, of course, the Industry, but also all those here who — despite the amount of time they spend rolling around in $90,000 Model S Teslas on the way to Blue Bottle Coffee for an $8 cold brew before hot kundalini with Tej Khalsa at Dogpound to center them for the next round of meetings — seem to possess an inordinate amount of wealth.
Does the money come from Silicon Beach or real estate development or cryptocurrency or private diamond sites in central Botswana or extensive family holdings in the Middle East? Who knows?
What is clear is that those for whom an obscenely expensive omakase lunch at Sushi Park, a joint in a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard, is their equivalent of a six-inch hero from Subway, can easily afford the version of those shirts that I’m fixated on.
I know this because the shirt is sold out. It is, in fact, a basic plaid red shirt whose cozy cashmere weave belies its humble appearance, whose Western-style snaps are inset with healing semiprecious stones, whose price tag ($2,250) is roughly equivalent to an average American’s monthly post-tax take home.
For this you can thank Brad Pitt. Mr. Pitt is said to be the silent partner behind God’s True Cashmere, a line of clothes produced by Sat Hari Khalsa, a holistic healer, spiritual teacher and jewelry designer who once was the road nurse for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
When they are in stock, the shirts are sold at Just One Eye, a store that is also sui generis Los Angeles. In no other American city could you hope to find an immense and slick yet airy establishment that seems less like a shop than an annex of Gagosian, the mega-gallery.
What other store in the world can boast of having “Hawkfliesagain,” a John Chamberlain sculpture, standing sentry at the entry, or a Damien Hirst cherry blossom painting the size of a billboard looming over the sales floor?
Name a retailer anywhere that stocks — as Just One Eye did on a recent visit — not only extensive selections from the Row and newish designers like Grace Wales Bonner or little-known French labels like Seraphin, but also the latest drops from the modish Milanese shoemaker Amina Muaddi; shrewdly edited selections from major brands that make you recalibrate your opinion of Prada and Gucci; hippie goddess pendants from Quore; reissues of crazy wonderful plastic Mod ’60s Paco Rabanne disc dresses; or hand-painted handbags by Oliver Coreaux, the tattooed artist who customizes Goyard St. Louis “It” bags for “It” girls like Gigi Hadid and Hailey Bieber.
You cannot do it. Maxfield, the retailer that first brought Japanese fashion to Melrose Avenue, used to be that sort of establishment. Now, though, as Maxfield celebrates its 50th year in business, it begins to feel less august and venerable than stuffy and oddly passé.
Just One Eye was founded by Paola Russo, a Frenchwoman transplanted to Los Angeles 30 years ago and who for much of that time served as Maxfield’s creative director. The first location of Just One Eye was unmarked, in Howard Hughes’s onetime headquarters, and was as tough to find as the germophobe billionaire with the tissue-box shoes was reputed to be.
“It was a pretty crazy building,” Ms. Russo said recently by phone. “It was a very secretive place and didn’t have windows.”
By contrast, Just One Eye’s current location in the booming Sycamore district (a new-media hub in central Los Angeles that was once so desolate that Joan Didion compared it to the setting of a Raymond Chandler novel) is all slabs of light falling across enough floor space to park, as GQ noted, a 747. It is all easy access.
And the welcome it extends to a visitor seems to go beyond mere shopping. “I’m all about energy,” said Ms. Russo, whose silent partner, Victoria Niarchos, nee Guinness, provides capital to fuel both the vibe and business. “L.A. is very specific, though I don’t think there is ever a particular look.”
Rather, there is a dominating Los Angeles script, one that is always part fantasy and that inevitably stars the city and its dominating energetic force — the weather.
“It is light in L.A. all the time, and we are all very motivated by that,” Ms. Russo said. “Especially now when the energy is so down and people are panicking, we want to think about the idea of wearing something new and putting yourself in a good mood.”
It is as though Ms. Russo has issued an invitation to come right in and wander contentedly amid the Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand furniture, past the Takashi Murakami sculpture, the Puiforcat silver, the God’s Own Cashmere slackers shirts (when they are in stock), the perfectly proportioned and prohibitively costly basics from the Row, trying on a life that might be yours, if only in your imagination.
Just One Eye
915 North Sycamore Street, Los Angeles; 323-969-9129; justoneeye.com
Atmosphere Picture Hedi Slimane setting up shop inside the Gagosian stand at Frieze Los Angeles.
Service The staff — provided you can track down a sales associate in the cavernous space — is as friendly and chill as the clerks at the Brattleboro Food Co-op.
Key Items Few places approximate the eclecticism that the store owner Paola Russo brings to her selection. God’s True Cashmere shirts are on my wish list, but they’ll have to wait until I sell a script to Netflix. Meantime, I’d settle for a re:la T-shirt ($85) with a quote from Simon Rodia, the visionary artist who constructed Watts Towers: “I had in mind to build something big and I did.’’