LOS ANGELES — Despite his nonchalant manner, jeans and mussed hair, Kelly Cole has definitive style ideas.
Cole’s incarnations include entrepreneur, actor, DJ and confidant to many boldfaced pals here and in New York. Today, at the Coterie show in Manhattan, he will add designer to the list with the launch of a contemporary sportswear and denim collection for women and men bearing the Lo-Fi label.
By peddling vintage rock T-shirts at premium prices — used tops start at $90 — out of his three-year-old Fairfax Avenue store Lo-Fi, Cole, who will be 35 tomorrow, has been instrumental in turning the T-shirt marketplace upside down. He also has attracted celebrity customers such as Eve, Gina Gershon, members of The Strokes and Jane’s Addiction and Winona Ryder.
Retailer Tracey Ross, among the first to preview the new line, has received an advance order that includes $85 skinny sweatshirts and $275 refashioned vintage studded belts at her Sunset Plaza boutique. She is eager to stock $165 jeans with the Lo-Fi embossed brass buttons and $990 slim-fitting leather jackets with the wide, pointed collars and heavy brass zippers.
“It’s hip, rock ‘n’ roll clothing with a vintage twist, and it merchandises well with my Stella McCartney and Chloé,” Ross said. She met Cole about four years ago. “His line is practical and it’s what the girls in L.A. are wearing.”
For Cole, the new venture — he projects first-season wholesale sales at $500,000 — “all connects” with his other projects. “This is a constant work in progress,” he said last week, standing between two crammed racks in the smaller of Lo-Fi’s two adjoining spaces. The storefront is actually a Thirties-era, canary yellow house-turned-shop and gallery on a commercial stretch of Fairfax, north of Melrose Avenue.
The store has two Technics turntables at the cash counter where Cole will spin anything from Neil Young to Barry White, as well as a flat screen constantly running old rock films and videos. There’s a couch and plenty of rock button pins, leather satchels and bohemian jewelry —all vintage — for sale.
When it comes to the new line, Cole begins with the details. He meditates on the bamboo buttons of a cotton voile shirt, then quickly jumps to show off the drawstring neckline of several cool floral sundresses. Just as abruptly he runs his finger along the geometric turns of the yolk on a Western shirt, and the patchwork of a white denim jacket inspired by originals from North Beach and East West.
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Back pockets of his boot-cut and flared jeans are stitched with a bird or lightening bolt, à la David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, or a scripted “Cole.”
He and Lo-Fi co-founder Gary Wagner have one goal: “Advancing the California lifestyle as an aesthetic,” Cole said. “It has to be organic. Just like the way I feel my way through business, through life.”
The pair opened Lo-Fi with hand-selected, old and, typically hackneyed rock T-shirts. Celebrities and stylists, either in search of tokens of their favorite old bands or the authenticity that a well-worn concert shirt might invoke, have flocked to the store, paying as much as $1,000 for an original Bowie 1972 tour T-shirt.
The new line isn’t about these sorts of attributes, however. Instead, bodies are cut from velvety fine wale corduroy, cotton piqué and seersucker and dark-rinse indigo and tailored to slimmer fits. Think Bowie, Bryan Ferry, or even Peggy Lee, Cole noted, in the case of a Fifties-inspired, silk dupioni party dress, available in bright red, turquoise, pink or emerald, and, he suggested, paired with cowboy boots.
“I repeatedly find that I like the same things over and over: clothes and accessories that are real, unpretentious, versatile,” he said.
Cole left his roomy residential loft on Manhattan’s Canal Street in 2002 when the lease was up. During his 15 years in New York, the Indianapolis native counted designer Stephen Sprouse as a friend, and he was an owner in Spy Bar and the East Village restaurant Black and White, designing the interiors of both.
Since migrating West, his scene has become a mix of the past and present. This spring’s exhibit for photographer Mick Rock spilled out of the tiny gallery into the parking lot as hundreds turned out, including stylist Arianne Phillips and Marilyn Manson.
Just as during his New York days, Cole’s circle inevitably contributes to his projects. For example, musician Ben Harper shared an old T-shirt with a peace sign and dove that Cole has modified for a new shirt benefiting Hurricane Katrina survivors.
“My ideology about everything I do has always been the same: Keep it simple, focus on the details,” Cole said. “Lo-Fi is a work in progress. We’ll see just where the market takes this.”