Paris Hilton, wearing boxy white sunglasses, and Nicole Richie, in a headscarf, are loading plastic shopping bags into the trunk of their G wagon. They’re efficient and focused, shoving in the overflowing bags and ignoring the paparazzi, who crowd and cajole them. Their bodyguard, with spiked hair and a shirt that reads: Hollywood, adds to the tableau. Even in the grainy footage, the label on the bags is legible: Fred Segal, in blue and red lettering. The year is 2006.
At the corner of Crescent Heights and Melrose, the Fred Segal parking lot might just be the most photographed stretch of asphalt in Los Angeles—the white railing, ivy wall, and brick pathway acting as the backdrop for countless paparazzi moments from the late 90s onward. Fred Segal is a name that is nearly synonymous with early-aughts Los Angeles.
The opening scene of Entourage is set outside the store: model types with long torsos, sweeping bangs, tube tops, and low-rise jeans walk to their cars with demure smiles, clutching their shopping bags, pantomiming Paris and Nicole. The look was practically a uniform: Ugg boots or flip-flops, crop tops, sparkly scarves, and tiny, branded handbags.
In 1961, Fred Segal opened a little jean store on Santa Monica Boulevard before moving to Melrose a few years later, putting high-fashion denim on the map. Instead of $4 a pair, he charged $20. This counter-intuitive merchandising started a craze, and soon everyone wanted expensive jeans. Creating a store within a store, Fred Segal made shopping feel like an adventure.
His nephew Ron Herman took over the company in the 1970s after running his own boutique in Orange County. By the mid-90s, Herman’s name decorated the ivy wall, marking his own offshoot in the same complex. Herman sold his brand to Japan’s Sazaby League Ltd. in 2019—and the stores in L.A. closed one by one, with the Melrose flagship shuttering at the end of last year. Fred Segal, which vacated the Melrose complex a few years prior, still has a handful of locations in L.A.
Ask any SoCal native of a certain age and she will have a Fred Segal story for you. The Westside girls told me about shopping for their Bat Mitzvah dresses there, or following Britney and Justin home, or driving up from San Diego once a year and having a salad at the café with their mom, or seeing skinny jeans for men for the first time, or getting up at five a.m. to wait in line with granola bars for the store’s annual sale.
John Eshaya, the company’s former vice president and women’s buyer for more than 20 years, tells me over tea, “If you were somebody, you came into the store.” Inside there was a strict no-photography rule. The store was meant to be a safe haven for high-profile clients, a respite from the paparazzi in the parking lot and the gazes of admiring fans.
Aly Pryor, who worked as a sales associate from 1996 to 2009, says, “I can remember a day where Jen Aniston was upstairs with Brad Pitt. Lenny Kravitz was downstairs in the T-shirt department. Ellen DeGeneres was in the jeans store with Portia de Rossi. This was, like, a Friday afternoon. Ron instilled in us that you were not to address a celebrity or a superstar as anything but a customer.... There was never a conversation about your new movie. It was very casual.”
The no-photos policy wasn’t just for the benefit of the Hollywood elite. Buyers from other stores also had prying eyes, often trying to knock off the clothes and merchandising. Pryor remembers that the manager of the store, Juliana Eshaya (John’s sister), used to bend down outside the dressing-room doors and look at the customers’ feet. “If it didn’t look like they were trying on clothes,” Pryor says, “if it looked like they were backing up to take a photo, she’d go banging on the door. ‘No photos! I’m going to need you to come out of the dressing room!’”
The store also served as a de facto incubator for emerging designers. Like Nina Garduno, who, as the men’s buyer at Ron Herman, went on to start FreeCity, a brand of hand-painted sweats and T-shirts that have become the uniform of Malibu yoga moms. Cynthia Vincent started out selling her clothes at Fred Segal and went on to create Vince, Twelfth Street, and Bacaal. Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor launched Juicy Couture with the help of John Eshaya, who carried the first velour tracksuits. Those basic pieces came to define a time (the early aughts), a place (SoCal), and an attitude (girlish, breezy, fitness-adjacent)—all in Barbie pink.
Fred Segal was also early to carry many high-fashion creators from Europe: Raf Simons, Dries Van Noten, and Maison Margiela. “The coolest thing was that when you went there, you were shopping for things that you literally could not get anywhere else,” says Sam Saboura, a sales associate from 1996 to 2003.
The staff of Fred Segal and Ron Herman had a reputation. In a way, they owned the town. They knew Cameron Diaz’s and Kate Moss’s sizes, their preferences, and maybe even what they looked like half naked. “We had little boxes with everyone’s credit card. I had, like, five credit cards for each of my celebrity clients written on index cards. And I’m talking, like, the president of Atlantic Records and the heads of Warner Bros.,” says Saboura. They possessed a kind of under-the-radar cool that set the tone for Los Angeles fashion culture of the late 90s and early 2000s.
Fittingly, the employees did more than just sell clothes. Garduno, who started working at the store when she was 17, created RH Vintage by gathering old concert T-shirts and pinwale corduroys and reimagining them. “It was a pile of crap. But you’d find a T-shirt from the Rolling Stones and Prince at the Coliseum with pit stains and you knew that would be valuable,” she says. She bedazzled them before “bedazzling” was a word. “People were in their garages with sewing machines,” studding the pieces so they looked like something.
“It was spit shining and elevating the clothes so they were something special.... It was this incredible alchemy.” Madonna, for one, wore RH Vintage in her “Ray of Light” video.
The team constantly redesigned the store, changing it to resemble a Hawaiian beach one week and a Swiss chalet the next. Eshaya says he rummaged through the same prop houses where set designers foraged for films. Pryor says, “If any of us came in and was like, ‘I made this,’ John would be like, ‘Sure, I’ll buy it.’” The clothes would have a $20 price tag the next day and sell out in a weekend.
“It was like the Wild Wild West of fashion retail. We danced on tables. John would kick customers out if they didn’t like the clothes,” says Pryor. “We were pretty vicious. And, well, we could be because we were in a position that nobody else was. Where else are you gonna buy your Margiela, sweetie? We were not to be fucked with. It was a good time. We played music really loud on purpose. It was a club.”
The “kids,” as most people referred to them, traveled in a pack, going out together after work, showing up hungover the next day. You could get a sense of what was going on in the city that night just by hanging out at the store. “It was like a subculture of L.A. in the 90s. Everyone that worked at that store was kind of like a mini-celebrity,” says Saboura. “We were invited to every party. When we would go to dinners, celebrities would get up and come to our table to talk to us.”
Ron Herman never bought ads, never put the brand’s name up on a billboard. Rather, the store’s promotion relied on the famous clientele, the parking-lot paparazzi, and the allure of their employees. “We were the influencers. And we didn’t even know we were,” says Juliana Eshaya. “This one particular woman would come in. She was, like, older, probably in her mid-50s. I never helped her, but she would look me up and down. And then she’d go to another salesperson and be like, ‘I want what she’s wearing.’”
There was also debauchery. “This was, like, the 90s. We did a lot of drugs. We did a lot of partying. There was some of that in our bathrooms,” says Pryor. “We made so much money. We were children. It was disgusting. We should have all had houses.”
After work, they hit Hollywood clubs such as Joseph’s, White Lotus, Star Shoes, and LAX (none of which exist anymore). Saboura remembers the work dinners: “We were ordering bottles of Cristal, and we were all kids, like, in our 20s. Our bosses would leave us with the company credit card open, and we would sit there and order $200 bottles of champagne.” On Sundays they would be hungover and eat McDonald’s. “Someone was always throwing up in the bathroom,” says Saboura. “But they would still turn out a $10,000 day.”
The party may have ended after the sign was pulled off the ivy wall on Melrose, in 2019, but the influence still lingers. In 2023, Balenciaga staged a fashion show in Hancock Park below the Hollywood sign. The clothes were uncannily similar to the Fred Segal–Ron Herman goods of the early aughts: candy-colored velour tracksuits, visible thongs, low-rise jeans, oversize sunglasses, Ugg-like boots, coffee cups in hand.
Many of the looks could have been pulled from the 2005 Steven Meisel “Hollywood Style” shoot for Italian Vogue, which mimicked the tabloids. It was an ode to Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and the fast-food culture of the era.
Today the store functions as an L.A. landmark even though its winding rooms are empty. “Barneys is gone, Charivari is gone, and now Fred Segal is gone,” says Garduno, feeling bittersweet. When asking an Angeleno for directions, the answer might be, “Go down Melrose and take a right at the Fred Segal,” a small tribute to a place that had such a vast impact on fashion, culture, and our ideas of a particular time and place.
“When a young star got their first show, or when a record label would sign a band, they would bring them to Fred Segal, and it was kind of like a rite of passage.” Saboura reminisces. “It was the heartbeat.”
Gracie Hadland is a Los Angeles–based writer