L.A. Chic

Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner

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...