For Los Angeles' Fairfax Streetwear Scene, It's the End of an Era
On February 25, The Hundreds shuttered its flagship store on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The closure was abrupt, not only eliminating the final physical Hundreds retail space but also one of the final extant threads of LA streetwear history.
To put it a tad more melodramatically: RIP Fairfax Ave.
Now, I'll admit that I've never been to Los Angeles. But even a lifelong East-coaster like myself was aware of Fairfax in its glory days.
A decade or so ago, Fairfax Ave was to Los Angeles as SoHo's Howard Street was to New York. Like Howard, Fairfax intersected with ritzy streets like Melrose. Also like Howard, Fairfax was briefly the epicenter of a vibrant cultural scene.
But whereas Howard was a narrow thread of happenings in the larger spiderweb of urban sprawl, Fairfax was one long stretch of scene.
Bobby Hundreds, the verbose co-founder of the streetwear label, helpfully catalogued much of the local scene on The Hundreds' blog over the past few decades, though recent posts are mostly just relegated to drops. Still, his interviews with neighborhood heroes like Melody Ehsani, whose Fairfax jewelry store opened in 2012, remain vital documentation.
In 2004, Fairfax's cheap rent and convenient-ish location earned it the privilege of hosting California's first Supreme store.
This became the locus of contemporary Los Angeles streetwear and plenty of local hotspots sprung up nearby Supreme. Most fell into two camps, either catering to classic skateboard culture like Sal Barbier's SLB skate shop or leaning into streetwear-meets-arts stuff like book-filled boutique Reserve.
But the Hundreds, which first opened on Fairfax in 2007 — its first store was really more on Rosewood Avenue, though, and thus nicknamed "RSWD" — was a little bit of both.
That very year, the Fairfax scene was crystalized in a spread for the great Japanese skate-street magazine WARP that brought nearly all the local store staffers and friends together for a group shot. Their stores were relatively sparse and, this being LA, quite spread apart, but they had created a darn close approximation of a walkable neighborhood. Most importantly, the Fairfax originators had created a real-deal community.
In 2010, designer Guillermo Andrade opened 424 on Fairfax, one of the street's first luxury multi-brand stores. That was the same era when you could catch Tyler, the Creator's Odd Future collective skating the street, bouncing from from Supreme to Diamond Supply.
Notably, Tyler opened his first GOLF WANG store on Fairfax in 2017, where it remains to this day.
That's the thing: There are still stores on Fairfax. Young shoppers continue to hit Ripndip and Heaven By Marc Jacobs, I'm sure. There's also a boutique called 4:30 that appears inactive to be on social media but sold interesting wares from progressive young labels like Vaquera.
But there's also a Dolls Kill and a handful of those sneaker resale stores that seem to crop up in places where culture has wilted.
When Supreme left the neighborhood for Sunset Boulevard in 2023, the New York Times was still referring to Fairfax as "the city's unofficial streetwear corridor." That was not necessarily wrong but it was also no more accurate than continuing to describe Howard as New York's youth culture hotspot. Sure, kids clad in Travis Scott cosplay stalk SoHo's most southernmost quarter to this day but, typically only because they're going to the Rick Owens store.
The culture is elsewhere.
Same for Fairfax, which is not a ghost town. I mean, GOLF WANG's Fairfax store is really only a 30-minute walk from La Brea, a modern upscale streetwear hub that hosts Union LA, American Rag and local outposts of Undefeated, Stüssy, Stone Island, Y-3, Arc'teryx, and Carhartt WIP.
It's all good stuff. But it's not Fairfax.
