Transplanting a style original
We have just left the Judaism corridor and are now in Christian drop-off territory,” Josh Peskowitz said, palming the steering wheel of his new Cadillac SUV as he drove past rows of synagogues and churches on the far west side of this city.
It was a chilly Sunday, somewhere in the low 40s. Late-season Santa Ana winds had scoured the winter skies to a marine blankness. Surface streets, too, were uncommonly empty as Peskowitz headed toward the Santa Monica Airport and a choice monthly flea market held there.
Peskowitz, a native New Yorker, was on an expedition to ferret out local experiences: the flea market; a visit to Arcana, a bookstore that is an Aladdin’s cave of rare finds; a trip up the coast to the Reel Inn, a fish shack he called “a little bit of Sheepshead Bay in Malibu.”
Peskowitz is a recent West Coast transplant and a particularly avid one. New York may be where he cut his teeth as a fashion retailer and emerged as a kind of style hero — Instagram loves him and whole Pinterest pages are dedicated to his sartorial doings. Yet Los Angeles, as it turns out, is where his singular mashup of streetwear, geek wear and Italian tailoring looks most natural.
That he wound up here owed mainly to a business opportunity. Invited by the developers of Platform — a shiny new hub of shops, restaurants and offices in Culver City, roughly equidistant from Beverly Hills and the Venice section of Los Angeles — to open a menswear store as an anchor tenant, Peskowitz and two partners created Magasin, a sophisticated multibrand shop that quickly established itself as a cult destination.
Favoring the brands Peskowitz himself wears (Common Projects, Dries Van Noten, Kolor, Eidos Napoli, Missoni, Tricker’s) and in the same off-kilter colors and proportions, the store functions like a continuing selfportrait arrayed on hangers. And it has an experimental looseness natural to someone who fetched up in the world of fashion almost by happenstance.
Born in Brooklyn, raised in Washington, style schooled from afar by the hip-hop legends that influenced his generation, Peskowitz, 39, honed his style starting with a job doing window display for Urban Outfitters and refined it over a decade or so at editorial jobs in publications as disparate as Esquire, The Fader and the late, lamented Cargo.
His last gig before striking out on his own was as men’s fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. There he concluded that what was vanishing as department stores withered and algorithms replaced merchants was “a real point of view.” This seemed particularly needful as consumers — the male ones, anyway — flail about in search of a plausible work uniform for an era when casual Friday rolls around every 24 hours.
Peskowitz jokingly refers to himself as “poor man with expensive tastes or an expensive man with simple tastes,” which is one way of saying he favors a strenuously hybridized version of high-low attire.
“My style has gotten a lot looser since I moved to LA,” Peskowitz said, after parking and heading for the flea market.
At Erin Powell’s Little Baby Kitty booth, he spotted a table full of floral embroidered sneakers from Thailand that looked like next-season Gucci. He purchased a pair for his wife, then scoured a stand offering mint-condition denim boiler suits and Wrangler cowboy shirts with all-important mother-of-pearl snaps. Finally he trawled a display crammed with what looked to be the contents of David Crosby’s accessories drawer.
“You know, I always want to fill up on rings, but I’m already full-up on rings,” said Peskowitz, whose hands are barnacled with silver.
Zeroing in on a Hopi silver ring inlaid with white abalone, he asked to try it.
“You sure?” said the vendor, Nancy Rose. “That’s a hippiedippy ring from the ‘70s.” “I’m down with that.” It is easy to get the sense that, behind the easygoing facade that is a large part of Peskowitz’s charm, is the focused temperament of a man seldom in any confusion about what he desires. Each of his many tattoos — an Urdu symbol for nonviolence; his mother’s initials in block letters; an Assyrian sphinx; a Japanese whale; the battle standard of Cyrus the Great — is as studiously considered as the labels displayed at Magasin.
“Since you cannot turn off anymore and there’s no distinction between work clothes and off-duty clothes, you need a formula for being casual and still a presentable human that can command respect,” Peskowitz said. “It’s basically about how to wear sneakers and look like a grown-up. You don’t ever want to be the eyesore. You want to be the interesting guy.”