Canadian designer Ashley Rowe has opened a new retail location in Los Angeles.Jason Kent/Handout
For Canadian fashion designer Ashley Rowe, following her instincts has led her in the right direction. In 2013, Rowe left Toronto, where she’d been running her popular namesake fashion label, to fulfill her long-time dream of taking a road trip to Mexico before moving to Los Angeles for the winter. Stopping in Marfa, Tex., to visit the city’s famous Prada boutique art installation by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Rowe was immediately drawn to the area. “It had a great vibe. I ended up coming to L.A. for six weeks and spent the whole time trying to find a place to live in Marfa,” she says.
Rowe settled into the artsy community, where she worked on improving her sewing skills and relaunching her label. It wasn’t long before she was fulfilling orders from global stockists such as Need Supply and Selfridges and expanding from a small studio in an old lumber yard to a 2,200-square-foot combination studio and retail space. “It was really so crazy how it was my gut instinct that I had to be there, I didn’t know why,” Rowe says.
Earlier this year, a return visit to Los Angeles had a surprisingly similar effect. “I went back to Marfa and I couldn’t stop thinking about this place.” Six weeks later, Rowe signed the lease on her new Los Angeles retail store, an all-white space in Koreatown designed to mimic her Marfa flagship. Rather than offering seasonal collections, Rowe’s denim line follows a specific colour theme for four months at a time, with bright orange being the debut hue in Los Angeles. “It’s been fun, all these orange things. It’s a whole new world in L.A.”
Ashley Rowe, 153 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles, ashleyrowe.com.
Ashley Rowe store and product images - Tie Dye Tee + PantHandout
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