4 new retail doors worth opening: Vanessa Seward, Shinola, Michael Aram, Combatant Gentlemen

Paris-based women’s label Vanessa Seward has chosen the City of Angels as the home for the designer’s first retail boutique in the U.S. The 1,000-square-foot space on Melrose Place was designed by French architect Laurent Deroo and mirrors the look of Seward’s Paris boutiques with marbled stone floors, mineral blocks, midnight blue lacquered display screens with solid brass details and fitting rooms appointed in fabric panels.

Officially opened late last month, the boutique offers the label’s full range of ready-to-wear, denim, accessories, shoes and custom jewelry as well as a limited-edition T-shirt celebrating the new space by proudly proclaiming: “L.A. me voilà” (translation: “L.A. here I am”).

Vanessa Seward, 8407 Melrose Place, Los Angeles. www.vanessaseward.com

Shinola opens at the Grove

Detroit-based watch and leather goods label Shinola is continuing to add to its SoCal standalone presence, this time with a 3,000-square-foot, two-story store at the Grove shopping center that officially opened its doors on Saturday.

Located between the Vince and Tommy Bahama stores (and across from Pacific Theatres at the Grove), the store offers the full range of Shinola-branded products including watches, watch bands, leather goods for men and women, bicycles, leather-bound journals, paper goods and pet accessories.

This marks door No. 3 in the L.A.-area for the brand, which opened its first local store in Silver Lake in November 2014, followed by a boutique on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice earlier this year. And the Shinola folks aren’t done yet – a fourth store is slated to open in downtown L.A.’s Arts District before the end of the year.

Shinola, 189 Grove Drive, Los Angeles, www.shinola.com

Michael Aram opens a West Hollywood flagship

Michael Aram, a designer known for home goods, tableware, furniture and giftable items handcrafted out of metal, has opened a West Coast flagship store in the former Tommy Hilfiger space at the southwest corner of North Robertson and Beverly boulevards in West Hollywood.

Only the brand’s second standalone store (the other one is in New York City), the 6,000-square-foot space is full to overflowing with a country garden’s (and its adjoining forest’s) worth of metallic-meets-organic creations; think lily-pad lamps, bowls formed from flattened silver leaves, side tables with sinuous, branch-like legs, and all manner of gilded twigs, corals, feathers and cactuses displayed as tabletop objets d’art, freestanding conversation starters or focus-pulling wall hangings.

In addition to the designer’s full gift, tabletop and decorative accessory collections, the store stocks pieces from his recently launched jewelry line, which features many of those same organic shapes in portable form – feather earrings, botanical bracelets and twig-like rings.

Michael Aram, 157 N. Roberston Blvd., West Hollywood www.michaelaram.com

Combatant Gentlemen finds a place at Santa Monica Place

A 4-year-old men’s suiting label with the scrappy-sounding name Combatant Gentlemen has made the leap from cyberspace to Santa Monica Place. The brand, which built its business by offering suits online in the super-affordable $160-to-$320 range (the fabrics are 100% Italian wool; the suits themselves are produced in China) has taken its made-to-measure services on tour in the past and, in May, opened a showroom at its Irvine headquarters. But the new 2,200-square-foot, sparsely appointed store on Santa Monica Place’s second floor has the distinction of being the first bricks-and-mortar location to stock the full ready-to-wear collection of suits, tuxedos, outerwear, dress pants, tops, bottoms, accessories and footwear.

The new space, which opened in late July, also offers made-to-order suits (in which the customer chooses from a range of fabrics and off-the-peg sizes via a touchscreen) for $340 and custom made-to-measure suits (that’s a start-from-scratch, fits-you-like-a-second-skin, from-the-ground-up proposition that usually requires a two-month turnaround), starting at $450.

Combatant Gentlemen, 395 Santa Monica Place Suite 200, Santa Monica, combatgent.com

For more musings on all things fashion and style, follow me @ARTschorn.

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