Los Angeles has found a sister city in Vancouver for denim style, judging by the turnout at the party celebrating Citizens of Humanity’s collaboration with Aritzia’s Wilfred. On Tuesday night, in the penthouse suite at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, guests including Whitney Port, Jamie Chung, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jen Rade and Jessica Paster previewed three styles as part of a winter capsule collection created by the two companies located on opposite ends of the West Coast.
In addition to high-rise slim jeans evoking Nineties supermodels and a classic skinny style, the collection, which retails from $188 to $235, includes a cropped straight-leg style cut from rigid denim sourced in Japan.
Catherine Ryu, women’s creative director for Huntington Park, Calif.-based Citizens, who worked with Citizens founder Jerome Dahan and the Aritzia design team, noted that the cropped jeans were inspired by vintage Wranglers. They turned out to be the popular pick among partygoers, who patiently waited for their jeans to be painted by artist Blanda Eggenschwiler, who goes by her first name professionally.
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Erin Wahl, Aritzia’s denim director, wasn’t surprised by the jeans’ appeal since Wilfred’s ethos is grounded in vintage fashion. What the customer’s demand is: “It has to be authentic, it has to be legit,” she said.
Plus, uniting the two brands together “just feels right,” said Oliver Walsh, Aritzia’s chief marketing officer.
Annalise Basso, the 17-year-old star of “Captain Fantastic” and a high school senior who was lucky enough to go out on a school night, thought so. She donned an off-the-shoulder white blouse by Aritzia and painted jeans from the collaboration, selected for her by stylist Warren Alfie Baker. The outfit was a departure from what she wore in “Ouija: Origin of Evil,” described in her words as a “Sixties female-driven horror film,” in cinemas just in time for Halloween.
Basso will do another drastic costume change for “The Good Time Girls,” a revenge Western that features Laura Dern as a bounty hunter who takes her broken character under her wing. Originally intended as a short, the idea was greenlighted to become a feature-length movie that will start filming next summer. For her role, Basso learned an interesting party trick from the same expert who worked with the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” “I had to train in shooting the gun,” she said, mimicking pulling a pistol out of her jean pocket really fast. “Super cool.”