An Afternoon Shopping In Echo Park

Being as we are a shopping magazine and living as we do in LA, you can imagine we get quite a few personal requests from friends and family for the inside scoop on shopping in LA. Indeed we've led more than one guided tour of Los Angeles shops. But while we spend an awful lot of time speaking of $500 dresses and $2000 sofas, our friends, like us, are usually hanging on to the bottom wrung of the monetary ladder. So before we go off into the dreamworld of avant-garde designer labels and Italian furniture companies we like to start off every tour with a visit to a little string of stores in Echo Park.

We're surprised it took us this long to add these shops to the guide, but we're not going to be too hard on ourselves. See these shops don't really like to open before noon or 1 and they spend their Mondays and Tuesdays nursing their headaches from the crazy weekend. A typical scene at this little one-block stretch of Echo Park Boulevard is sort of surreal. On any given hot afternoon you'll find the stores' staff parked on the sidewalk in plastic chairs, usually with a cellphone or magazine or drink. You can walk from store to store undisturbed and whatever it is you just picked you better really want it. Because then you must walk out of the store and interrupt the store clerk who is on the phone with her friend/reading her art magazine/sipping her cold beverage and say "Hello, I would like to engage your fine establishment in some economy-stimulating and small-business-supporting commerce, oh, and by the way, how much does this thing in my hand cost?" The slightly perturbed clerk will then quote a price that's usually quite affordable and if she's feeling generous might even throw in a tidbit about which young artist/independent label/small local company made your lip gloss/jersey dress/ghetto blaster belt buckle. So don't be sending us messages like "I went to these stores and the shop girls pretended like I didn't exist. How rude!" Relax. Have a cold drink (in the corner coffee shop) and enjoy shopping, Echo Park style.

We consider Show Pony the anchor of the block, with its artful mix of locally designed, reasonably priced clothes and accessories.

Han Cholo, provides the block with some urban edge. The store is best known for its line of men's and women's jewelry that feature Star Wars and other pop imagery. But the store also has a line of cool T-shirts. We bought their black Stars Wars/LA scene logo T-shirt in black and it's become on our favorites (we don't know that hell they did to this think but it is super comfortable and the black wont fade).

And of course, the obligatory vintage store is called Flounce. The small space is stuffed with women's clothing and accessories at prices way below the vintage stores in the Hollywood/La Brea area.

OK, so there's actually one more store on this block which, if memory serves, is called "Work." But, big surpise, it was closed on our last couple of visits and it'll have to wait until we drop by another day.