After the L.A. Wildfires, 5 Angelenos Rebuild Their Sense of Style

On the night that Luc Brinker lost his Malibu home, the fashion and modeling agent had seen the smoke of the Palisades Fire coming over the mountains. He made sure his nine-year-old son and the nanny safely evacuated, then gathered a few practical items, among them clean underwear, two pairs of Céline jeans, three pairs of cowboy boots (including a pair of Luccheses in python) and four Hanes white Ts. He loaded it all into his car alongside his two dogs and a few cherished works of art. Then after saying goodbye to more than 200 pieces of legacy denim and 243 pairs of shoes, he closed the door and drove away.

That night, Brinker lost a fashion collection that had taken decades to build. They’re just clothes! one might argue—but similarly, art collections are just paintings and libraries are just books. From a young age, particularly as a gay boy in a conservative Oregon small town, Brinker understood fashion as a vital form of individual expression. “My personal style was defined by all of the pieces of myself that happened in those years,” he says, and the items he owned were attached to major milestones in his life. His 1994 Gucci loafers, for example, were his first purchase as a high school student with a job at the grocery store. His efforts to replace the irreplaceable have been slow-going since the Los Angeles wildfires have calmed. “I’ve been to every department store, and when I tell you that I left with nothing,” he says. Everything he found was too new, too impersonal, too 2025.

Since fires that swept through Los Angeles in January destroyed thousands of homes, many in L.A. are mourning the loss of their material possessions. Clothing, easily dismissed as something frivolous or replaceable, was no minor loss; what we wear, regardless of fashion, is an affirmation of our sense of self.

It’s a concept the sculptor Kelly Akashi understands well, despite never having a truly vested interest in fashion; the night she lost her Altadena home and studio, she only vaguely remembers grabbing a pair of Reeboks and a red Uniqlo coat. With almost nothing to wear, she had assembled a placeholder wardrobe: blank v-necks sourced from a Target that had already been picked over. “There was no luxury of ‘Do you like these shirts?’” she says. “It was just: ‘These are shirts we can get.’” On top of the devastation of losing everything, she felt the acute distress of losing touch with a sense of style: “You kind of detach from how you know yourself or who you think you are.”

With help from friends who gave her more specific clothing, Akashi says she felt like an individual again, albeit someone else; wearing another person’s clothes can feel as dislocating as living in their house.

In the early days after losing her home in Altadena, artist Kenturah Davis was grateful for all the clothing friends had brought her. “I literally had nothing, and so anything was a gift,” she tells W. In the following weeks, her enthusiasm for accepting more pieces waned—she wanted to feel less passive and more intentional. Most days now, she opts to wear the Big Bud Press denim shirt and overalls she purchased for herself. “The freedom to decide was so liberating and so helpful for me,” she says. “It felt so good to just choose.”

The calls to evacuate Altadena had come suddenly and in the middle of the night, sparked by burning embers floating on 90-mile-an-hour winds. Jewelry designer Kimberly Whalen and her husband left their Altadena home for the very last time at 3:30 that morning. “We thought we were coming back the next day,” Whalen says. Like many of their neighbors, they left with little more than the clothing on their backs. She took her late mother’s watch and perfume, a few legal documents, a coat, a sweater, and a pair of pants. She lost her house, her designer archive, and Weird Bits, her jewelry line of one-of-a-kind pendants that she had painstakingly sourced from different parts of the world. An unfortunate part of the grieving process is intermittently forgetting what’s happened, as she catches herself offering to lend pieces of clothing that no longer exist. “I think it’s my brain’s way of coping,” she says. “It’s not ready to admit that this is real.”

The beauty that sprung from the fallout was the tremendous outpouring of mutual aid—efforts somewhat sullied by the assumption that fire victims would accept anything they were offered. Almost immediately, relief centers inundated with fast fashion and damaged items began turning away donations of clothing altogether. Black Sunday, a monthly free store for alternative youth displaced by the fires, has specific guidelines for donating: “tightly curated, small batch donations of clean, new or lightly used items.” Trash bags are prohibited. From there, “alternative” falls under a large umbrella; the inaugural edition featured band T-shirts, lace babydoll dresses, pleather corsets, and more—some donated by members of bands like Bauhaus and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Tyler Hubby, a self-described Gen X former Goth, put the call out for donations to his network of punks and musicians; initially, it was only for his best friend’s family after they lost their Altadena home. The response was so great that he set up shop in his Echo Park front yard, and moved it to a monthly event in Pasadena. “The baby bats needed us, and the elder Goths came through,” Hubby says. For 21-year-old Mirabel Gallegos, one of his friend’s daughters, the specificity of it made her feel seen. She even found a Misfits tee T there to replace her favorite shirt from the band, which she had lost in the fires. It gave her a sense of comfort in its familiarity, she says. “I have worn it every other day since I’ve gotten it.”

Kristopher Young, the musician also known as Grandfather, attributes personal style to confidence. He’s less apt to describe his fashion sense in terms of categories, but “personal items have energy,” he says. After losing his Altadena home, he had been offered his fair share of garments, but they felt impersonal, like the offloading of undesirable pieces. Rather than feel obligated to accept, “Having the option to say no was huge for me,” he says. Given the practical limits of what he can store without a permanent home, and feeling suddenly unburdened by any material attachments, came a sense of renewal he wanted to maintain. “Having a clean slate, I’m being selective about the energies I want to bring into every part of my life,” he added.

There is such a before and after for people, where material possessions became more and less important. For Whalen, the most mundane things—comfortable shoes, a clean pair of socks—hold more weight than rebuilding her archive of collector pieces. “It was fun having these things, loving them and appreciating them. But now I’m ready to have a functional closet,” she says. Akashi is foreclosing on the past, refusing to wear what she did before. “There is me before and after the fire,” the artist added. “The before me is now archived in the past.” In contrast to others, Akashi is embracing the clothes she would not normally wear and the possibilities they carry. “Maybe it is an opportunity to be someone else,” she says.