Retailer Opens Boutique of Unexpected
Los Angeles’ West Third Street is fast becoming one of the city’s top retail streets for fashion with an avant-garde edge. The neighborhood’s newest boutique, All Purpose, opened on Oct. 16 on the corner of West Third and South Flores streets, and co-owners Alon Rosenfeld and Alessandro Tomassetti plan to up the ante with the bohemian.
The 250-square-foot boutique stocks Tomassetti’s brand Filius, a menswear line that includes upscale items such as the woven shirts with collars constructed with French-cuff detail. For colognes, there’s New York City–based CB Perfumes, a brand that claims to capture the aroma of a library. San Francisco–based Citizen Citizen produces a black rose lapel pin made out of materials used to make bulletproof vests.
While all of these items might pique the interest of avant-gardists, Tomassetti hopes that the store won’t be merely known for promoting different styles. Instead, he hopes that All Purpose also will be celebrated for fostering unlikely collaborations between designers.
For example, Tomassetti plans to work with Canadian typographer Marian Bantjes by spring 2007. Instead of creating new fonts to be used in books, she’ll use her letter art for the back pockets of the store’s jeans brand, also called All Purpose. The limited-edition jeans should all have a different point of view, Tomassetti said. “What would an architect or a chef do with jeans?” he wondered.
Tomassetti, who worked as a designer for Petro Zillia from 2004 to 2005, plans to use the back of the store as the design studio for the Filius collection. —Andrew Asch
