Summary:
- Miista opened its fifth store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and held a housewarming party on 28 October.
- The store layout follows an amphitheatre, with soundwave clothing rails inspired by the drawings of Daphne Oram.
- Ananas Ananas built an installation for the night, and Saturn Risin9 and Arrow De Wilde played live DJ sets.
Miista opened its fifth store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Laura Villasenin founded the London brand in 2010, and the company now makes footwear, accessories and ready-to-wear. The new address joins stores in London, Barcelona, Paris and New York. The team marked the opening on 28 October with a housewarming party for friends in the city.
The groundwork started years earlier. Miista held its first Los Angeles pop-up in 2013. This year, the team hosted a rave in a working garment factory and repaired guests’ clothes while they partied. The brand describes the local crowd as fluid, with an appetite for the alternative. The store took longer to open than the team planned, and Miista says projects need time to grow into the right form.
What Miista means by a home
Miista calls its stores homes. The brand says these spaces have brought together making, connection and its community, which it calls the Crowd, for 16 years. You should feel at home in any of them and meet like-minded people wherever you are.
Each store hosts workshops, talks and live music in collaboration with local creatives. The events make space for dressing as a ritual and for trying different sides of yourself. Miista defines home as a spirit and an attitude rather than a fixed location. The space holds the brand’s values and inspirations, and ideas change in response to the people inside.
A store designed like an amphitheatre
The Los Angeles store follows the design approach of the other four. The layout references an amphitheatre, a circular venue with rising tiers of seats around a central area. Miista draws on underground culture, niche music scenes, historical figures and subcultures for its spaces.
Inside, shoes and boots sit on staggered shelving. The shelves surround the clothing and accessories at the centre. Soundwave rails hold the clothes on squiggled lines at several levels. The shape comes from the freehand sounds drawn by Daphne Oram, a pioneer of electronic music in the 1950s. Oram co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Her Oramics machine used waveforms drawn on 35mm film.
Wide vitrine windows bring in daylight. Miista treats them as a view into the brand, including when the store is closed. At the fitting rooms, you walk through arches shaped like people and sculpted roughly by hand. The brand links these details to a liking for the imperfect. A white canopy hangs across the ceiling and shows pattern pieces: a sleeve, a leg, a collar and a cuff. These parts mark the start of the process behind the garments in the store.
Opening night on Melrose Avenue
The housewarming party took place on 28 October. Verónica González and Elena Petrossian founded the Los Angeles food-art studio Ananas Ananas in 2019, and the studio built an installation for the night. The structure was a spiked, spinning form covered in glossy fruit. Some of Miista’s favourite leathers inspired the design. The studio makes temporary pieces on purpose and asks audiences to interact with food through several senses in experimental ways.
Guests talked about who inspired the fitting room arches and which spots on Melrose they like best. Old friends reconnected. New connections formed.
Saturn Risin9, a multidisciplinary performer based in Los Angeles, and Arrow De Wilde, a Los Angeles native and frontwoman of the punk rock band Starcrawler, played live DJ sets. Miista describes the evening as a first taste of the store’s plans, built on performance, conversation, experimentation and connection.
If you are outside Los Angeles, you find Miista footwear, accessories and clothing on the Miista online store.
Kristin Kaye
Insatiably curious about human expression, she immerses herself in literature, theater, art, and dance. Her academic journey led to degrees in Modern Literature, where she delved into The Furioso, and Historical Sciences with a focus on Contemporary History. Her studies took her to the prestigious Erasmus University Rotterdam, broadening her international perspective.
Her passion for culture isn't confined to personal enjoyment—it spills onto the pages of various publications. There, she explores not only artistic endeavors but also civil rights issues and the myriad ways human culture manifests itself. For her, writing about these topics isn't just a profession; it's an irresistible calling that stems from her deep-seated fascination with the human experience.
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