EVERYTHING OLD is new again,” Kitson owner Fraser Ross said with a sigh over the phone from West Hollywood in August. We were discussing the booming nostalgia market that is churning out early-aughts fashion and pop-culture trends for renewed consumption two decades later: low-rise jeans, mini-backpacks, Paris Hilton, Bennifer. They’re all back in the Zeitgeist, with only slight tweaks.
Ross opened Kitson, what he called a “general store for the rich,” on Robertson Boulevard in 2000, selling everything from designer cashmere to graphic tees, Swarovski-encrusted hairbrushes, and diet books. Ten years before the launch of Instagram, when celebrities still relied on People’s “Star Tracks” to publish their candid photos, they would pop into Kitson for a new set of True Religion flares before lunch on the patio at the Ivy. Stars and starlets—some A-list, many more C and D— would teeter out of its doorways laden with baby-blue shopping bags to see and be seen by a waiting swarm of photographers. It was where Britney Spears went on a shopping spree at two in the morning, in ripped-up tights, before being hospitalized. It was where Kobe Bryant bought bracelets (leather, diamond-studded, $3,000 each) for his wife after being accused of infidelity. Warner Bros. once threw a lavish industry party there in order to, in Ross’s words, “make Tweety Bird hip and hot.”
Ross and Kitson, seemingly, have an opportunity to cash in on the millennium reboot moment. He could sell a cool again baguette bag next to a picture of Hilary Duff carrying its 2005 predecessor. He could be a docent in the Kitson living museum, recounting the exploits of his favorite customers while selling their tell-all memoirs.
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