L.A. Times Image 2025 September Image Makers issue

I’m not sure what it is about me that compels people to give me their clothes. “You like it?” My friends will routinely say when I admire their things. “Take it, I rarely wear it.” There are the jungle-patterned pants, the yellow button-down blouse with ruffled sleeves, the cobalt blue cardigan. I love my hand-me-downs, which in the narrow openings of my 1920s Los Angeles closets have become a problem because I don’t want to give anything anyway. Shopping for new clothes can be stressful for me — especially when I adore things on the rack that then don’t match up on my body. But somehow, when the item belongs to someone else, it almost always fits perfectly. I’ll often receive castoff clothing with more excitement than buying something new, and I think it’s because a garment seems more beautiful when it once belonged to someone I love.

My greatest collection by far descends from my mother. Any time I visit home, she fills my suitcase with her clothes. Easily half of my things now are hers, including accessories (only shoes are out of the question because we’re a size apart). There’s the flowery Kenzo jacket, the chunky pearl necklace, the daintily thin Oliver Peoples sunglasses, the slim brown pants that are lined like the bark of a tree. Most of the things I wear that get compliments were once hers — many of them rare vintage pieces, and all of them elegant like her. “Mommy archive?” Keyla Marquez, Image’s fashion director at large, has already gotten used to asking me. It’s my way of knowing that I will always carry my mother forward, into another time.

This Image Makers issue looks at art and fashion through the lens of inheritance — the intergenerational conversations that happen between artists and their families, the continuous references to the past and where we came from. “The only thing that is worth something is the archive,” says Estevan Oriol, the revered photographer who’s documented this city for over three decades. He is the star of one of four covers this month, which was photographed by his father, Eriberto Oriol, another L.A. legend whom you might recognize on that multicolored mural in Echo Park off Sunset. Our other covers (which you can see on the last page of your copy) feature Melody Barnett, the owner of the 57-year-old rental house Palace Costume; High Society, a family-run Korean tailoring studio that’s made clothes for anyone from Prince to Kobe Bryant; and designer Kwame Adusei, who references his Ghanaian lineage in every piece he crafts.

The images that we take and make, the clothes that we design, tailor and borrow, become even richer and surprising with age. It is the things that outlast time that are the true gifts.