How LA Fashion Is Rebuilding Post-Fires

“They’re pretty broad, experience-based auctions that we’ve been doing for a little while, and it’s been successful. This time we probably raised over $100,000,” says Hanazawa, who co-founded the organization alongside Julie Gilhart, Miki Higasa, and Tomoko Ogura in 2011 in response to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Since then, they’ve raised funds for a number of disaster relief efforts. The money raised for the fire recovery will be given in grants to schools around the Palisades and Altadena. “We like tangible results, actually building something,” Hanazawa says. “Whatever we can do to bridge between the emergency and immediate needs and long-term needs.”

Hanazawa, who lives in the Palisades, recalls the day the fires started. “We’re in a wildfire-prone area. Every year, we have warnings, saying there might be wildfires, but oftentimes the firefighters manage to control the fire, and then it’s fine. But January 7, it was different.” She was meant to have a meeting at 11am, but received a photo of an ultra-backed-up PCH beforehand. “Within 30 minutes, my street was jammed with cars. I’m like, OK, this is not the same as a regular wildfire. We need to evacuate.” Hanazawa went back home the next day. Her house wound up surviving, but many of her neighbors’ did not. “I saw a lot of homes that were just burning without any firefighters or people. Nobody was stopping the fire from spreading. I’ve never seen anything like that,” she says.

Walker is now reconciling what it means to have lost her ‘work home’, if not her actual home. “Having lost the little baby that was the footprint and the platform for all our other stores was something unfathomable,” she says. “But when people lose their homes — 7,000 structures burnt down, and I am going to imagine north of 6,000 of them were homes — it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself. You didn’t lose your home.”

At the time of the fires, Elyse Walker’s two Palisades stores made up 45% of sales and 48% of profit, Walker says. In order to keep the business afloat — and keep as many of her sales associates working as possible — Walker kept about 80% of orders. She’s finishing the year down just 16-18% in sales and about 10% in profit. “We were pretty bold, and we were very lucky,” she says.

It will be a long time before things are back to normal. “Everything was lost overnight. Your dentist, your restaurants, coffee shops, schools, your friends’ homes, they were all gone,” Hanazawa says. “That really tore our community apart.” Many of her neighbors haven’t returned, even those whose homes survived. Some have moved out of the LA area altogether.

It’s, in part, why Elyse Walker is opening back up in the Palisades this summer. “Rick [Caruso] called me and said, Elyse, I know you’re looking around — we were trying to find a location in Santa Monica or Brentwood to get our team back to their work home — but I have an idea,” Walker recalls. He wanted Walker to join his rebuilding efforts. It was the first time she’d cried since the fires, she says. “We built the Palisades for 25 years, and now I know what my next 25 years will be.”