Los Angeles, the historic capital of hippie fashion, denim and streetwear, has seen French labels flourish in all its neighborhoods in recent years. Just over thirty luxury, premium and mainstream fashion houses have boutiques in LA. To this figure must be added around ffity French labels distributed in various multi-brand stores.

Almost all of the major luxury brands have a presence in Los Angeles, and have been vying for square footage in Beverly Hills for years. Leading the sector with nine boutiques, including department stores, Louis Vuitton made its mark in 2022 with the opening of the world’s largest two-storey men’s store on Rodeo Drive. 
 
Chanel, for its part, opened a fabulous five-storey boutique dedicated to its fashion collections, jewelry and accessories in 2023. “The most beautiful store ever imagined by Peter Marino,” explained Bruno Pavlovsky in May 2023, at the cruise collection show in Los Angeles. “It manages to incarnate all that is best in our brand. What is it today – luxury, sensitivity and beauty. We erased our old store and reconstructed the best we could from scratch.”

In summer 2024, Givenchy opened a superb boutique in historic Frank Lloyd Wright building, also on Rodeo Drive. Hermès, Saint Laurent and Celine also have their boutiques a few steps away, and Dior has been preparing the reopening of its department store with café for over a year. 

Another neighborhood invested by French brands, West Hollywood is home to Ami, Balmain, Chloé and Isabel Marant. Present in Los Angeles since 2013, with the opening of its first boutique on Melrose Place, Isabel Marant, led by CEO Anouck Duranteau-Loeper, doubled down a year ago in Palisades Village.
 
“The brand has always had an American bias,” explained Duranteau-Loeper. “After New York, Los Angeles quickly became the obvious choice. The brand’s cool, luxury image fits perfectly with the city, and our style is very much in tune with the LA casual vibe. After Melrose Place, Pacific Palisades enabled us to offer our products to another customer zone.”

A last expansion at Palisades Village shopping center, which has been put on hold by the fires that ravaged the Pacific Palisades neighborhood last January.
 
As Isabel Marant’s biggest market in terms of business, the United States is likely to remain an area of exploration for the brand. “We’re always on the lookout for other developments, outside the traditional luxury zones. But our timing today is more focused on consolidating the network of boutiques than on further openings,” added Duranteau-Loeper. Over the last 5 years, the brand has grown from 10 to 100 boutiques worldwide.

A little further east, Sycamore Avenue, in Hollywood, saw the arrival of French brand Officine Générale and its founder Pierre Mahéo, who opened two boutiques almost simultaneously in 2023.
 
“The United States is our biggest export market today. After opening in Soho, New York in 2021, we opened two boutiques in Los Angeles almost back-to-back in 2023. Our Sycamore Avenue store has always had the best results,” said Mahéo. “It’s a neighborhood invested by music, with the presence of Rock Nation, Just One Eye fashion labels, art galleries and restaurants. Our elegant, undressed style, soft jackets and cashmeres appeal to an international clientele of Americans living in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, who travel for business or pleasure.”
 
On the other hand, the choice of a boutique in Palisades Village, now temporarily closed due to the January fires, opened Officine Générale up to a more local clientele, “the customers based in Malibu, Venice or Santa Monica, the others not going there considering it much too far away,” continued Mahéo.

“Stable results overall, added to a geopolitical and economically uncertain context, is putting the brakes on our desire for further developments in California, and in the U.S.”

 
Next door to the Officine Générale store, luxury eyewear brand Jacques Marie Mage, founded just over ten years ago by designer Jérome Mage in Los Angeles, has also opened its second boutique in 2023, two years after its first opening in Venice. In the eyewear luxury sector, Ahlem, the brand founded by Ahlem Manai-Platt, also opened in Venice in 2017, and now has four boutiques, including two others in the US, in San Francisco and New York.
 
“I opened my first boutique in Venice in 2017, initially because I lived just a few steps away. Then, Abbot Kinney became the coolest street on the West Coast according to GQ magazine,” said Manai-Platt. “Despite rising rents and the arrival of mass-market brands to which tourists didn’t really respond, the neighborhood is making a comeback today.”
 
In the field of contemporary, accessible fashion, other French brands are making inroads, mainly in selective malls and shopping centers. The case of Sézane, Morgane Sézalory’s brand, which, after trying out several pop-ups, including one at the Platform shopping center in Culver City, finally opened its first ‘Sézane Apartment’ at Brentwood Court Mart, the chic shopping center in the Brentwood neighborhood. A perfect location for the brand, frequented by many mothers and fashion-loving women, and adjacent to the Goop, Jennifer Meyer and Clare V stores.

In a similar price segment, Zadig & Voltaire, Thierry Gillier‘s brand, widely present in the United States via a network of some 60 boutiques, has four stores in Los Angeles. Iro, the brand created by the Bitton brothers and now controlled by the Chinese group Fosun, has two stores in Venice and Beverly Hills. Maje, the brand from the SMCP group, has five boutiques, most of them in shopping malls. Same story for sister brand Sandro, present at The Grove and Westfield Century. 
 
For the first time a few days ago, the American Vintage brand and its owner Michael Azoulay reached Los Angeles, opening its very first store on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. This development is part of a global expansion plan for the brand on the American market, with “a stated objective of 15 extra stores in the country by 2025, including Los Angeles and Austin,” said Azoulay.
 
Another breeding ground for French fashion, Los Angeles multi-brands now carry more than fifty French labels. At Just One Eye, founder Paola Russo, raised in France, distributes Lemaire, Louboutin, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Rabanne and jewelry brand Sylvie Corbelin.

Maxfield targets luxury brands with Celine, Chanel, Courrèges, Casablanca, Isabel Marant, and recently began distributing Louis Gabriel Nouchi label, Salomon shoes and Le Gramme jewelry brand. H. Lorenzo presents collections by Coperni, Jacquemus, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marine Serre, Vaillant and jewelry by Parisian designer Lorette Colé Duprat. Culture Edit concept store offers the Paris-based brand Carne Bollente and Departamento sells Salomon Advanced shoes and Lemaire. 

Located at the Beverly Grove, The Webster, founded by French entrepreneur Laure Hériard-Dubreuil loves Ester Manas, Etudes Studio, Givenchy and Ouest Paris. Finally, locals will find Jacquemus and Lemaire at Mohawk General Store in the East Side of Los Angeles. A neighbourhood where French brands Kitsuné and A.P.C. have been attracting thousands of creative people in their stores for several years now.

Golden Age Hollywood, a cutting-edge concept store with a vintage selection, is also part of the East Side’s French fashion scene. Founded by Frenchmen Ludvic Orlando, a former footwear production manager for H&M, and Jesse Bardy, a vintage specialist, Golden Age Hollywood first opened in 2016 on Melrose Avenue, mixing rare vintage with shoes inspired by Hollywood’s golden age. Press and celebrities alike, with Lily Rose-Depp and Vanessa Paradis as loyal followers, and fashion people including Hedi Slimane and John Galliano, encouraged the brand to open in Silver Lake in 2018 and then Marseille. 

“Today, 50% of our offer focuses on French workwear, with the remainder dedicated to military and American vintage. We were the first to bring workwear to Los Angeles, and our ‘bleu de travail’ jackets branded Le Mont Saint Michel, Lafont, Le Laboureur have become our signature, with models sometimes over 100 years old and others pulled out of deadstocks,” explained Orlando, as Angelina Jolie steps through the door. “In addition to customers, stylists and designers from LA, Milan and Paris come to us, as do Hollywood costume designers, musicians, actors, actresses and the whole fashion world.”
 
Just over two years ago, another Frenchwoman, Clémence Pariente, former assistant to Benedikt Taschen, founder of the Taschen publishing house, opened her boutique in the Echo Park neighborhood. A concept dedicated, in part, to French lingerie. “French lingerie evokes savoir faire and a sense of effortless elegance,” said Pariente. “Alongside the French brands Cadolle and Jasmina, I now offer my own brand. I’m not reinventing the wheel, but I put a lot of thought into the fit, especially the shape of the panties, and the response from customers has been incredible.”
 
Other French brands could make their debut in Los Angeles in the coming months with new stores. Some are reporting that Jacquemus has already found a location.