Out of an Airport, Into a Melting Pot

NEW YORK —  I just love when life answers a question you didn’t even know you were asking. I am here covering Seventh Avenue’s fall 2000 fashion shows from the perspective of a Southern Californian. I grew up in New York and for the last 3 1/2 years, have lived in L.A. I have considered myself in city limbo: half a New Yorker and half an Angeleno. But now I know that’s no longer true. I realize this city is no longer home; I have become a Southern Californian.

Rad!

L.A. and New York have to be two of the most diverse cities on the planet. But in New York, one is thrust into the melting pot, instead of being cocooned in a car, as so many of us are in L.A. Case in point: After feeling the nip of 30-degree weather outside Newark Airport the other day, I hailed a cab and proceeded to step into another universe.

“Quatre-vingt blanche!” my cab driver yelled into his hand-held CB. “Quatre-vingt blanche!”

I looked over the partition and asked the driver, who was wearing a gigantic Nanook-of-the North fur cap, the obvious: “You speak French?”

“Yes. You speak French?” he said, mumbling words not covered in my fourth-grade French book.

“Un peu,” was all I could muster.

Getting into a New York cab is a game of United Nations roulette: It’s almost a given your driver is going to be from a foreign country. My cab driver was a Haitian named Joseph Stelus. He and eight other Haitian cab drivers were warning each other by CB about bad traffic around the city.

“Quatre-vingt blanche” (“80 White”) is the handle of one of his cabby colleagues.

What I find so sad about L.A. is that the various groups--ethnic and socioeconomic--seem to live such separate lives. That’s why (hold on, let me get up on my soapbox), I think if everyone used the buses and subways, we might all be able to understand each other better. Not that New York is utopia, but one encounters people of all sorts on public transit here, and that can’t be bad. It’s very frustrating to me that one of my friends who lives in Santa Monica didn’t even know that L.A. has a Little Tokyo. I mean, really, get out of your SUV once in a while, girl!

She might not ever go to Little Tokyo, but if she had to look at a Red Line map, she’d at least know it exists.

*

British handbag designer Anya Hindmarch creates sturdy, classic-looking leather purses with tassels and bows but is perhaps better known for her quirky sequined evening bags inspired by English candy wrappers--Cadbury’s and Malteasers, for example.

People are fascinated by another culture’s products, she said. “In England, it’s very hip to have Carmex [a lip balm], but in America it’s nothing. It works both ways,” she said.

After 13 years in the business, Hindmarch, 31, opened her first U.S. store in New York last month, and, perhaps more important, several celebs carried her bags at the Golden Globes.

“It’s been a lovely, quiet progression,” she said at a party the other night. “It would be a bit scary to be catapulted into success. I’m not sure I could handle it.”

Her new line of photographic bags has been selling at stores like Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. Each purse features an amusing, almost folksy close-up of a dog, a sheep or a couple sitting in rocking chairs. For spring, her hobo-shaped bag emblazoned with a photograph of a red rose was featured in Elle and British Vogue.

Hindmarch said she gets frustrated when one of her designs--the rose print, for example--sells out too quickly, but she does not want to make too many of one thing. “People are looking for something a bit different,” she said. “They are tired of going to a party and having the same bag as everyone else.” (We’re not half as tired of that as we are of not being able to find the hot bag of the season because it’s sold out!)

Hindmarch’s bags ($300 to $1,200) are available in L.A. at Saks, Barneys, Madison and Tracey Ross. Maybe I’ll put out a few calls to see if any rose bags are left!

*

Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.