Every season, when Mike Amiri’s characters stroll on, you know they’re about to play their part in the latest installment of his long-running series set somewhere in the fantasy life of LA. In this season’s show, he trained his spotlight on a guy with a shady kind of glamour; shirts unbuttoned, shoulders glinting, hands stuck in the pockets of his lean, tailored pants.
“I always tell the Los Angeles story, the rock and roll, something sunny and optimistic,” Amiri said backstage. “But one night I watched American Gigolo, and I saw Los Angeles in a very dark way, a seductive way.” From there, he was sketching out a script involving a cast of sharply-dressed night-crawlers, thinking about where they’d be glimpsed in the shadows of dimly-lit bars or the back rooms of private members clubs. “There’s something dangerous about these characters and the places they go.”
Giorgio Armani famously costumed Richard Gere in his drapey, greige-y suits, and, in one famous sequence, snug-fitting jeans and a beige blazer. “The period when it came out was 1980, so I started thinking about the colors and kind of what I wanted to do with that.” It was a theme that played to Amiri’s strengths, and to his audience of men whose tastes have now decisively moved on from streetwear or anything to do with sloppy casuals.
Amiri’s popularity lies in his American talent for translating a look into something easily attained; a top-to-toe style persuasively spelled out in the desirably simple equation of tailored jacket and high-waist, belted pants, always worn with Western boots. To add to this template is an entire wardrobe of options of louche-ly unbuttoned shirts, sometimes shown doubled-up, his rich array of decoratively-patterned slinky cardigans, and sweaters. Plus his statement-making tooled and embellished leather bombers. All brilliant options readymade for a main character sort of guy who wants to stand out, yet also have the confidence of being in the flow of fashion.
Mike Amiri understands and has traveled alongside this large audience for a long time, working hard on elevating his cuts and techniques to the point where he can claim Amiri to be “a luxury LA brand.” His tailoring looks better every season. “It has kind of kept evolving, but maintaining that loucheness,” he said. “The only difference is it just kind of keeps getting tighter and tighter.” He was asked how he came to evolve the trouser fit, lean of leg and high of butt, that made its eye-catching debut this season. Amiri had a great LA answer to that: “The cut’s based on the shape of Wrangler jeans. It elongates the legs.”
There was an emotional moment when Amiri greeted his family at the end of the show. His wife and children were there as always, but his parents had flown from LA for the very first time. His father got up to embrace him. “My dad,
he knows I’ve done well in what I do, but he’s never got to see what it really means.” He thanks his father for encouraging him, and for inspiring him with his style. “He was always a well-dressed man.” Well, if you want to know where Amiri’s nostalgic love of 1970s and ’80s men’s fashion originates, the answer’s right there.
“I used to come here thinking, you know, this is Paris, and how do you show up to Paris?” he reflected. “And I’ve kind of learned that my strength is that I bring what I have from Los Angeles here, and I execute at the level that’s expected on these platforms. So for me it’s kind of a continuous evolving story, trying to maintain the same poise, and give people that character.”
