To walk into an H. Lorenzo store is to be given a window into someone’s brain. You can’t always say that about a retail experience. A mall (as unfashionable as those are now) is sterile, with uniform displays and the aroma of a Hot Dog on a Stick disrupting your experience. A luxury, one-brand boutique — think the Gucci or Saint Laurent stores on Rodeo Drive — offers vision, to be sure. The majesty of a glorious heritage brand condensed into an opulent storefront. But those stores are designed and sculpted by a corporate structure that prioritizes shareholder value and brand identity above all else. H. Lorenzo, by contrast, is a family business. The first thing you see in their men’s store is the metal, spiral racks tastefully stocked with hoodies from brands like Kapital and Jacquemus, and bold graphic tees from Martine Rose or Acne Studios. While these clothes are not common, they aren’t jarring. Bold, but wearable. And the deeper you go into the store, the more the store begins to dig its talons into you. Giant black military boots, vests with a million pockets, and something I’m not exactly sure where it goes on the human body. Celebrating its 40th anniversary, H. Lorenzo, the brand, and Lorenzo Hadar, the man, are looking back on their impact on the world of fashion. In Los Angeles, H. Lorenzo is where you go to be reminded that fashion can be high art.

Lorenzo Hadar, founder and owner, wears Muji Lab jeans, Club Monaco T-shirt.

Lorenzo Hadar started in retail in 1982. He’d been able to save some money from working construction jobs and parlayed that into a chance to build a retail business, lugging suitcases of exotic couture from Europe back to Los Angeles by himself. This method, called “cash and carry,” allowed him to open his first boutique, La Mirage. It quickly became a hit with the fashion crowds of the glam ’80s in Southern California. “Whatever we put in — boom, sold out,” he told me by the sky-high display window of the men’s store in West Hollywood. Lorenzo ended up moving La Mirage to the Sunset location for the most L.A. reason imaginable: parking. Sunset Plaza, where both the men’s and women’s branches of H. Lorenzo live today, offered a massive lot in the back. With that move, the name changed to H. Lorenzo, since a hotel-casino called the Mirage had just opened in Vegas, and Lorenzo didn’t like the association. This would be a fateful decision, because the store is not just a store. It’s not merely a set of walls and some clothes. It’s a humming, vibrant human expression. One that’s been passed down to the next generation.

Mac Hadar, director of operations and menswear buyer, wears Comme des Garçons top, Issey Miyake bottoms.

Lorenzo’s son, Mac, is now the business’s director of operations and the steward of the company’s men’s store. His eye for fashion was developed early. As Lorenzo describes it, the decision for Mac to join the family business almost 23 years ago was one that was easy for both of them. “He came to me one day and said, ‘Daddy, I need to talk to you. I don’t want to go to school anymore. I’ve learned nothing. I’m bored to death.’ My wife went crazy.” Instead of being handed the reins immediately, Mac started in the basement as a runner, putting security tags on the clothes before they’d go out to the floor. Now, he’s the one who decides what goes onto that floor.

Like his father, Mac is unassuming and casual, but where Lorenzo is full of energy, always putting on a show and playing maestro for his customers, Mac is more reserved. You can find him behind the register most days, strategizing and orchestrating the H. Lorenzo business from a distance. The store, Mac says, “can be a lot of different aesthetics, but they really all kind of tell the same story.”

Aria Daniella Clemente, director of special projects and visual merchandising, wears Ambush necklace, Nina Ricci by Harris Reed top, thrifted bottoms.

Like a lot of boutiques in L.A., at H. Lorenzo the customers are often stylists working with a celebrity or another high-net-worth individual. In a way, Mac and the buyers for the other stores (Athena Son at the women’s boutique and Xochitl West at the Robertson location, HLNR) are buying for those people, their needs and the peculiar dictates of a life in front of a camera. H. Lorenzo was a hot spot for celebrities from the beginning. Mac remembers meeting James Brown and Lorenzo boasts about selling to Tupac Shakur. Rihanna’s instantly iconic baby bump reveal from 2022 — pink fur coat and baggy jeans — would not have been possible without H. Lorenzo. The distressed, wide-leg jeans were purchased at the women’s store. The rich and famous trust H. Lorenzo because they know that the staff will stock things no one else will ever find. The pieces are rare, curated and considered. It’s that trust that has allowed H. Lorenzo to outlast contemporaries like Fred Segal, which suffered from the rise of online shopping. Nothing you see in the store is what Lorenzo would call “disposable fashion. They wear it once. They show it on Instagram, but they can only wear it once.”

Katy Shayne, content director, wears Issey Miyake dress, Rachel Comey jacket and Hopp Studios shoes.

Athena Son, buyer and store manager of the H. Lorenzo women’s store, wears Acne Studios suit and Balenciaga shoes.

RUIbuilt dress and arm accessory, Laura Andraschko shoes

Invasive Modification boots, Blumarine bag, Undercover gloves

Michael Harris, assistant manager at the H. Lorenzo women’s store, wears Ann Demeulemeester jeans, ASOS shoes and Versace glasses.

Vintage Marni belt at the H. Lorenzo Archive.

Tino Del Zotto, manager of H. Lorenzo Archive store, wears Chy By Chy top, Marmot bottoms and Heliot Emile shoes.

“I think it’s very important to have a strong identity, a real point of view,” Mac says. “You know, you can buy the same things everywhere, more or less, and your branding needs to be very focused and to kind of stand for something.” That something is hard to define, but one of the joys of the H. Lorenzo universe is the “you know it when you see it” effect that each and every piece in the stores has when you touch it.

“We’re trying to find the small details,” Son, the women’s buyer, tells me in the carpeted bottom floor showroom of her store. Son came to H. Lorenzo after an education at London College of Fashion and stints at brands like Burberry and Saint Laurent. She met Lorenzo through a mutual friend in Paris and was convinced to pack up and move to L.A.

The easiest way for a customer to trust a buyer’s vision is to see how they dress. Lorenzo and Mac both have that pared-down, simple L.A. loucheness — T-shirt, a conspicuously worn-in mule or sneaker, and some technically minded pair of pants. Just how the L.A. man wants to look going to Erewhon or the vet’s office. Son carries herself as she’d want her customers to — cutting-edge European looks and a natural sophistication. To her, buying decisions come down to elements that the average customer might not even notice: the silhouette, the buttons, the lining of a thing. “I’m really trying to curate and cater to everyone. We obviously have a specific clientele in mind, but somebody who’s more avant-garde can purchase here and somebody who’s looking for something more body conscious and fun can also find something.”

Joanna Downing, sales associate at the H. Lorenzo women’s store, wears Entire Studios top, MM6 jeans .

Derrick Arellanes, stock manager at HLNR, wears Issey Miyake Homme Plisse outfit.

Chino, security at HLNR and Prayers band member, wears Alpha Industries jacket, Pro Club hoodie, Solo shorts, custom belts and Doc Martens shoes.

Izzy Du bag and Botter top

Mac puts it another way: “[H. Lorenzo] is not just one thing, it’s a whole mix. And everybody has their own identity and they kind of understand what works for them. I think that’s what’s great about this store and sets it apart from some other stores. You can kind of find your place.”

Fashion and the pursuit of style are, in a sense, a stumbling, bumbling journey. Discovering the most authentic version of you is the goal. In the ’80s, when Boy George or Billy Idol were coming through Lorenzo’s boutique to buy the latest outré designs from Europe, the sales staff at a store would be your guides. Or maybe it was a magazine like GQ or Vogue that set the template for who or what you aspired to be. Fashion media post-internet gets more diffuse every year. And the way customers want to be engaged with in a bricks-and-mortar store has changed too. In Lorenzo’s heyday, he would join his customers on the shopping journey, pointing them toward the pieces he thought they’d want. When he felt like a trend had run its course, he’d simply stop carrying the product — regardless of whether it was still selling. That keen eye and forethought created trust with his customers. For Lorenzo to say a trend was over, it was well and truly over. “I said, ‘We’re done, we move on.’ You know? You have to take risks in life. You have to do that to be relevant. To bring something new to make them excited all the time.”

Mac’s generation wants space to shop, to contemplate alone. Sales staff at H. Lorenzo don’t immediately interact with customers unless they ask. Regulars still get the white-glove treatment, but it’s all about feeling out what that person needs in the moment. It’s less about directing you toward what’s “now” and more about helping to facilitate a personal identity that runs deeper than just the clothes on your back. As trends lose their power to compel us to part with our money, or micro-trends on TikTok make it feel impossible to keep up with what’s happening, the idea of authenticity takes on more weight. Even in the era of the celebrity stylist, the idea that you are the architect of your own aesthetic, that it is an extension of your “brand,” is crucial to the job of being famous. Instagram memes about “types” (West Village girlies, Silver Lake dads, Hackney sleazoids) categorize us all into tribes down to the underwear we pick or the deodorant we use. Fashion has always been about identification, but technology has made it more acute.

Xochitl West, buying director, wears Ottolinger blazer and skirt.

Aria Daniella Clemente, H. Lorenzo’s visual merchandiser, designs the stores in a way that allows you to find yourself, to lock into a vibe, an aesthetic or a worldview that can inspire not just a purchase, but an entirely different way of living. “When you welcome a person into the store, that’s kind of like you welcoming them into your universe,” she tells me. “Being able to communicate that in a few seconds to a minute is so important.” The color-blocking of clothes, where things are placed (the more approachable clothes are at the front of the men’s store for a reason) and the design of the stores all scream “curation” and give customers the space to dwell and ponder. Those spiral racks are sculptural and arresting, but far from obtrusive. Yohji Yamamoto, Ann Demeulemeester and Maison Margiela might not immediately seem connected, but merchandised together, there’s a lyrical harmony to the racks. It tells you, “If you are this kind of person, who likes this one thing, you will probably like everything else next to it too,” says Clemente. It’s as close as one might get to “feeling seen” by a clothing store.

That all points to fashion’s current state of distress. The big names are losing market share, their creative director roles now a musical chairs game of a handful of people trading jobs. There’s a sense that houses like Gucci have lost their identity under the dictates of the conglomerates that own their trademarks and designs. Brilliant fashion minds often talk about “selling the fantasy” of luxury, that it’s about going to that boutique and being transported into another world. But in our modern age, we are in a persistent state of fantasy. Portable screens and social media let us live vicariously through better-looking, richer people. Streaming movies, TV shows and songs take us on trips to other realities. Fantasy is abundant, but what H. Lorenzo has offered for 40 years is the vision and artistry of powerful designers to customers who might otherwise have never known them. True art isn’t a mere illusion of imagination, but a reflection of the artist’s perspective. To see art is to journey into the mind of another, to share in their reality. H. Lorenzo allows us all to interact with style as art — on the ground, with our hands and eyes and ears. It’s fashion made real.

Becca Hao, HLNR manager, wears Hoda Kova top, thrifted shorts.