Take a Tour of Magasin, LA’s Raddest New Menswear Store

Liam Goslett May 9, 2016

Everything in my store is bananas,” Josh Peskowitz yells out, after seeing me try on a floral jacket from TS(S). He’s floating around the store, re-merchandising racks for the second time since I’ve been in, while flipping through Spotify on his phone.

The goal is to help men along the road of building a wardrobe, Peskowitz explains, having landed on Van Morrison. We’re sitting in Magasin, the newly opened Culver City men’s shop helmed by Peskowitz — the former men’s fashion director of Bloomingdale’s — along with partners Simon Golby and Christophe Demaison.

“How do you put men at ease with trying new things, and going one or two standard deviations away from what they already own and what they’re comfortable with?” he asks. “Because that’s what’s important to me.”

The first step was to build a store that makes you feel comfortable when you walk in. To accomplish this, he outfitted the shop with massive windows that heap natural light onto the clothing racks, bucket-hat-clad sandalwood mannequins, mismatched midcentury chairs and a 25-foot-tall living green wall that houses the store’s dressing rooms. It’s an environment that feels lived in, even though the shop itself is just over a month old.

The plant wall, however, means more to Peskowitz than simply looking good. “It was important to have a green wall as a part of what we’re doing because while it’s about precision and straight lines and things that are constructed beautifully, it’s also about being organic, and there is a lot of texture and things made by hand. I wanted the architecture to convey that feeling.”

That organic ease is a concept that carries throughout the store. At Magasin, everything is cross-merchandised and mixed together, so that customers get a sense of an attitude, rather than a brand narrative. “The clothing in this store is made with integrity and it’s made to be a part of your life not for a season…[but] for years and potentially decades.” To wit, labels like Massimo Alba, Camoshita, Engineered Garments and Salvatore Piccolo play on racks together, while shoes from Common Projects, O’Keeffe and Feit are mixed in with beads and bracelets, scattered beside boxes of handkerchiefs and pocket squares that each offer their own personality.

There’s custom jackets from Eral 55, an Italian company which typically doesn’t do ready-to-wear, but crafted a small run for the shop from deadstock cloth. When it came time for denim, Peskowitz worked together with Levi’s to create 40 pairs of jeans available only at Magasin. The Golden Goose sneakers for sale are Magasin-only as well.

Peskowitz, however, assures me that he isn’t interested in exclusives. The reason to develop these garments was the same motive that directed the buy and the build – for the objects in Magasin to feel special. “I’m never going to ask them to do an exclusive, just for the sake of it being exclusive. I want it to be something that feels like it belongs in the store.”

He’s succeeded. Everything in the shop feels like it’s supposed to be there to convey a single unified idea. Even the socks, whose colours match those in the vintage Afghan rugs that cover the concrete floors, are perfectly on point. It’s an “interpretive way of dressing like a grownup,” as Peskowitz puts it.