Believe it or not, Santa Monica offers more cultural opportunity than the Boardwalk and Promenade.
Don’t get me wrong. I love shopping along Third Street Promenade, bolting in and out of stores, joining the gawking crowds watching teens break-dance or 6-year-olds belting out Christina Aguilera songs. But there is only so much corporate street fair that one person can take before growing weary.
As one of the closest neighboring cities to UCLA, Santa Monica does not seem to offer much but another nice suburb to drive through, however the Santa Monica Civic Center Auditorium hosts events, ranging from fairs to concerts to trade shows, every weekend.
As a flat-topped, blocky, wide, white-colored building that looks like an unimpressive high school gymnasium (thank you, 1950s architecture), the Civic Center does not appear to be a place that attracts colorful crowds, but the lines outside every weekend show that there’s plenty happening. In fact, from 1961 to 1968 the Civic Center even hosted the Academy Awards. While Oscar sightings now require a trek to Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, the Civic Center still hosts events that hail people from all over the nation.
The Civic Center recently hosted the Vintage Fashion Expo, for example. Eighty-five vintage fashion sellers from all over the nation gathered in the Civic Center to sell and display vintage clothing, accessories and fabrics. Outside the doors stood flocks of elderly ladies donning their widest-brimmed purple hats and red feather boas, teenage girls sporting flirty 1950s sundresses and retro red lipstick, and couples searching for funky additions to an apartment pad.
Inside were booths lined one after the other, beckoning visitors with careening racks of cat eye glasses frames, silken gloves, opalescent pearl jewelry, and crushed velvet, lace-trimmed, and beaded dresses. This wasn’t just a larger version of Westwood’s Thank You Mart. (For the record, I’ve never seen another store sell the kinds of sequined vests that Thank You Mart boasts.) The clothing for sale here was true, one-of-a-kind fashion art.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of high fashion is limited to what I’ve learned from watching “Project Runway,” and most of my clothing comes from conventional chain stores. Hence, as I fingered through racks of hand-sewn evening gowns with lace spiraling up the sides and lacing intricate enough to confuse even the most adept of Victorian-era bedside maids, I felt like somehow I was intruding upon a sacred fashion space. Touching this clothing felt like touching a Picasso painting on the wall of a museum ““ you just don’t do it.
Alas, through my searching of rack after rack of clothing items, I found something I truly loved: a 1950s-era cashmere and cotton blended sweater modernized with a hand silk-screened moth decal. I pulled the sweater off the rack with the care (and slight twinge of guilt) of reaching to the top of the refrigerator and carrying down the cookie jar. Somehow, it just seemed too soft, too old, and, well, too cool for someone wearing baggy Old Navy jeans and a ratty T-shirt to own. Yet it wasn’t outrageously priced and, heck, these vintage clothing sellers were here to sell.
As I asked the woman selling the clothing if I could purchase the sweater, her eyes scanned me up and down and she smiled.
“These are one-of-a-kind, you know.”
I nodded. Then, I asked the question that revealed the fashion loser I truly was:
“This has to be hand-washed, right?”
The seller laughed.
“Of course it has to be hand-washed! I mean, this is a fairly sturdy blend, not our finest to be certain, but … well … honey, are you a hand-washing virgin?”
I blushed.
“Um, when I travel, I’ll sometimes wash, like, underwear in the sink.”
She scrunched up her nose and narrowed her eyes. She, of course, was appalled.
“Whatever you do, do NOT wash this sweater like you’d wash your underwear. If you scrub the cloth together, you’ll deteriorate the quality of the fabric before you know it.” She chuckled again. “How cute. A hand-washing virgin.”
I looked back up at her, nodded, handed her the cash, and dashed out of her sight as quickly as possible. This sweater was mine, and there was nothing “˜High Art Lady’ could do about it. Ha!
Of course, I hope that by visiting the Civic Center you will not run into people who embarrass you or question your sense of fashion, but why not try to discover groups of individuals all gathered in one place to share one common interest?
From the outside, the Civic Center may not look extraordinary, but inside there’s a lot more to offer than the glossy racks of stores inside the strip mall.