A Matter of Taste
My idea of haute couture is wearing two shoes of the same color.
I have been known on occasion, due to an inability to distinguish between subtle shades, to wear one brown shoe and one black shoe. Fortunately, they are the same kinds of shoes, and since newspapering isn’t exactly a hotbed of fashion, hardly anyone notices.
I mention this to explain my intense feeling of dishabille when I met with Emiliano Moreno, also known as Tito, who at 32 is one of Southern California’s up and coming fashion designers.
I can’t tell you now how I was dressed when I walked into his Whittier studio, but I’m sure it was all wrong. I wasn’t wearing a ragged T-shirt or anything like that, despite its popularity among young male film stars. I have some sense of decorum if no sense of style.
All I know is that I was fully dressed, my fly was zippered and I was wearing shoes that matched. I checked.
I met with Tito because the fashion industry has always fascinated me, and also because his mother, Susie, has been lobbying me for three years to meet her brilliant son. I can withstand almost any kind of pressure except that which comes from a determined mom.
All right, OK, I’ll meet Tito. Now leave me alone.
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My preconception of a fashion designer drifted between that of a floating figure with an airy attitude and an acerbic critic of everything anyone ever wore. A sort of Tinker Bell meets Jabba the Hutt. Wrong again, Martinez.
Tito is an amiable, upbeat and extraordinarily talented young man who has designed for, among others, Madonna and the R&B; female trio TLC, whose tunes are completely unknown to me but which, I am assured, is more popular than God.
Madonna, I know. For her he created a strapless, micro-mini dress, then added as a kind of afterthought, “with matching panties.” I suppose that for Madonna the panties might be an afterthought, except at weddings and royal functions.
For TLC, it was what he described as “a black, shiny robotic look” for their music video “No Scrubs,” during which the singers move in a style similar to Japanese animation. An adequate coordination of sound and movement, not to be confused with real music, is all it takes to sell $150 million worth of videos.
A boutique owner, Maryann Acuna, describes Tito’s work as “fashion-forward” and agrees with others that he’s an up-and-comer in the multibillion-dollar fashion industry, much of which is situated in the L.A. area.
Tito favors the “spacey, new millennium look” that deals in metallic, reflective fabrics. They consist of apparel intended for people in show biz and not for the missus to wear while shopping at Mervyn’s.
His work, praised by Hollywood stylist Helen Mitchell as top of the line, is good enough to be featured in a Rock and Fashion exhibit in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not bad for a kid from Pomona.
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Tito’s studio, called Empire, is on a quiet street in Whittier not far from where he lives. Clothing that he sells to non-show biz customers makes up the front part of the studio, hanging from racks placed systematically here and there. A cutting table, sketches, piles of fabric, mannequins and various types of sewing machines fill a large back room.
Almost movie-star handsome, he is so upbeat he bounces, brushing aside questions of possible racist attitudes toward Latinos in the fashion industry. “We’re all friends,” he says with a smile that glows brighter than a metallic bra. “The industry is competitive but not racist.”
He’s been interested in art and design since grammar school, with encouragement to the max by his relentlessly cheerleading Mom. Dad too. Acuna considers his fashion illustrations works of art, and indeed they are, evoking not only the styles that drape perfect figures but the emotions that radiate from them.
Tito travels the fashion world on a regular basis--Paris, Hong Kong, Barcelona and Thailand--in what seems an endless search for the silhouettes and fabrics that will constitute tomorrow’s look, however fleeting that “look” might be.
His illustrations have appeared on the covers of a half-dozen Spanish-language magazines and his fashions are in demand by such notable Mexican singers as Patricia Manterola and Juan Gabriel.
To Tito, there is no ethnicity in fashion. Bodies are bodies and he covers them with style. “I always look forward,” he says with that sunlit glow, utilizing a phrase that encompasses both his art and his attitude. “I always look to tomorrow.”
I left him wishing I were better dressed, whatever I was wearing, but glad that at least my shoes matched.
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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. His e-mail address is al.martinez@latimes.com
