Molly Rabuchin left the Elysewalker flagship store in the Pacific Palisades Tuesday morning with her wallet, phone and a box of clothes to leave at a client’s nearby home. A leading sales associate at the luxury fashion store for 18 years, Rabuchin left behind her briefcase and a rack for another client, this one London-bound, hung with a Balenciaga wool-cashmere coat, wide-legged Celine jeans and size 41 Gianvito Rossi boots.
She never returned. As the Palisades fire ripped through the Los Angeles hillsides above the community at 10.30am, Rabuchin’s boss and the store’s owner, Elyse Walker, evacuated the store, a Towne by Elysewalker shop across the street and a third store in nearby Calabasas.
By evening, Walker says, “My son called me and said, ‘Mom, the store is on TV.’” On television, she watched her flagship store, first opened in 1999 and later expanded to several storefronts, burn to the ground. “It looked like the store was poured with gasoline,” she says.
It’s too soon to know how much has been lost in the series of wildfires raging across LA this week, which have killed at least 10, displaced thousands and levelled more than 2,000 structures. The fires have encroached on residential neighbourhoods and commercial developments across the city in a way that locals — who are largely used to brush fires in the hills and the canyons — say is unprecedented. The fires, fuelled by months of drought and the powerful Santa Ana winds, reaching up to 100-mile-per-hour gusts, remain uncontained as of Thursday evening. It’s considered the most destructive fire in LA history.
Many of Entire Studios’s staff had to leave danger zones, including co-founder Dylan Richards Diaz. “As our house was in an evacuation area, my family and our dogs moved into our studio in Downtown LA,” he says. “I took the opportunity to order blow-up mattresses in bulk so that if there were ever another emergency like this, our studio space could serve as a refuge for staff, their families and friends.”
Pacific Palisades was one of the first communities to be hit and has suffered some of the worst damage. Churches, schools, businesses and homes are lost. People abandoned their cars near Walker’s store, running away on foot due to jammed traffic on the narrow hilly streets. Nearby, other stores, including Mother Denim and an upcoming La DoubleJ flagship — set to open in six weeks — also burned to the ground. Palisades Village, the upscale shopping mall owned by Rick Caruso that’s home to brands including Anine Bing, Brunello Cucinelli, Favorite Daughter, Saint Laurent and more, was damaged but remained standing.
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