An eerie quiet hung over the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday. Entire stretches of storefronts were shuttered. The only noise was the low thump from a boombox in front of a boba shop.
At what few businesses were open, customers were few and far between. A rumor had circulated — via a WhatsApp screenshot — that two large clothing wholesalers in the area were scheduled to be raided that day, several owners and employees said.
The raid never materialized, but the effect was clear. The area, already rendered a ghost town following a raid by federal agents at Ambiance Apparel on June 6 that resulted in the detention of dozens of people, was somehow even quieter and emptier than in previous days.
“Nobody knows what’s really happening. Nobody knows where the raids are happening, so people just post things and they create fear,” said Adnan Akram, the owner of I Heart Fashion in Santee Alley. “It’s kind of hurting the economy as a whole.”
Akram said that the day after the raid at Ambiance Apparel, he saw a 50% drop in activity in his store compared with a normal Saturday. Sunday was even slower, he said. Monday and the following days, “it was a ghost town,” he said.
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Besides Akram, about a half-dozen owners or employees of businesses in the area told The Times that their sales had dropped by about 50% in the last week.
Some brand owners who employ immigrants who are undocumented, or who have papers but still fear federal agents, have sent workers home altogether and halted operations.
“It’s been super slow. You can see how it is outside,” Crystal Torres said behind the counter at her Santee Street store, Bijoux Bijoux, framed by rows of glittering purses. “I have bills. I have a kid to support.”
Torres said she’s worried about her community.
“My mom used to be undocumented,” she said. “It hurts. We are Latinos. I’m worried about my friends.”
The usually bustling and vibrant Fashion District sprawls across more than 100 blocks in the downtown L.A. area, with more than 4,000 independently owned and operated retail and wholesale businesses.
More than 15,000 people work in the area, according to data from a 2024 report from the Fashion District’s Business Improvement District. Last year, more than 18 million people visited the district.
The Fashion District’s Business Improvement District, a private group of property owners in the area, said the area has seen a sharp falloff in foot traffic since the raid at Ambiance Apparel.
Visitors to stores and business in the Fashion District dropped 33% last Sunday compared with a week earlier. Visitors to Santee Alley dropped by 50% over the same period, the group said.
“So many people have been volunteering to help clean up graffiti or pick up trash, but the biggest help is going to be coming out and shopping at these small businesses,” said Anthony Rodriguez, the business improvement district’s president and chief executive. “You’ll potentially be helping families who might have been victims of the ICE raids.”
Business owners in the area have expressed fear over the financial and physical security of their businesses, he said.
“They’re scared and they don’t know what this means for them, their businesses or their families,” he said. “We’re not a district of big corporations and businesses. We are mom-and-pop shops, mostly immigrant-owned.”
The fashion industry started to boom in Los Angeles after World War II, with Hollywood costume designers entering the scene, said Ilse Metchek, the former president of the California Fashion Assn., who has worked in the industry since the 1950s.
American designers, including those who fashioned costumes such as Marilyn Monroe’s iconic white dress from “The Seven Year Itch,” gained prominence. Around the same time, the bathing suit business took off, as war-time fabric rationing lifted and the culture shifted to allow less modesty and more playful expression.
In the ’60s, a patchwork of showrooms and stores called California Mart was established in downtown that became a fixture in the fashion world, and around which other businesses in the district flourished.
“It was the center of the universe where apparel was concerned,” Metchek said. The complex remains, although it is now known as the California Market Center and functions as more of a high-end mall.
Big names in fashion such as American Apparel and Forever 21 have had major presences in the area. Forever 21 is closing its doors downtown after filing for bankruptcy; American Apparel faced similar financial struggles, but its founder created a new label, Los Angeles Apparel, that has a factory store in the district.
Today, Metchek said she estimates that around 80% of workers in the Fashion District are immigrants. When she owned and operated a manufacturing company in the ’80s, she said she benefited from then-President Reagan signing a new law that gave legal status and a path to citizenship to many unauthorized residents.
That “amnesty” law created a “palpable difference in the attitude” of the employees she had without papers, she said.
“Before that, when they left my premises, they looked right and left to see if ICE was around, every day, all the time. They lived with that,” Metchek said. “We had the same problem and now this is like the same thing all over again.”
Immigrants make up not only the fashion industry’s workforce; in the neighborhood, they are the customers and business owners too.
Jennifer Flotas said her husband, a Mexican immigrant, started his clothing wholesale business in the Fashion District about 10 years ago. He was undocumented at the time.
Although he’s a citizen now, she said she can imagine the stress of keeping the business open while fearing deportation. They sent their four workers home this week as a precaution.
“It’s a scary time,” Flotas said. “A lot of people are closing their businesses and are not coming back. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
Javier, a garment worker in the area who declined to give his last name, works in a factory affixing buttons to clothing alongside about 20 other workers. Word of the raid at Ambiance Apparel spread quickly to workers at other factories, he said. He and other workers left early that day and have not returned.
The manufacturer, which Javier asked not to be named, has remained closed all week.
The 54-year-old said he does not know how he will provide financially for his family if he cannot go to work. He lives with his wife, his daughter and his 9-year-old grandchild. Only his daughter, who has legal status, leaves the house.
“We are basically caged in,” he said.
The Fashion District does not loom as large over L.A.’s economy as it once did, said economist Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics.
“The apparel industry has been struggling for a while,” he said. “It struggles because L.A. is an expensive place to do business … and apparel is a really tough business to be in in the United States.”
The reality is undocumented migrants are “just part of our labor force,” Thornberg added. “Obviously it’s bad for those families and it’s bad for those businesses, and I don’t think you’re accomplishing much outside of stoking fear and then trying to create political points for yourself.”
A smattering of customers walked through Santee Alley — a normally colorful experience. But on Thursday they were treated to mostly metal grates.
Not a single customer browsed at A Accessory, a store in the alley Jim Hwang has operated for more than two decades. Business has been dismal for six days straight, Hwang said.
“My opinion is most people work hard. [The federal government] thinks if they have no papers they are criminals and must be deported. But most people work,” Hwang said.
Malia Lew, a sales associate at Sunday Brunch, a swimsuit wholesaler, said she has her identification documents out and ready at work ever since Ambiance Apparel raid — even though she’s a U.S. citizen.
“We thought we too would be raided, and we heard they were taking whoever,” Lew said.
The minimalist storefront she works out of has two racks of colorful bikinis lining both sides. Lew sits at a desk toward the back, facing the front entrance. The door is open to customers, but she said she’s ready to lock the door at a moment’s notice.
Lew’s boss has assured her she can shut down the store if she needs to.
“I will not compromise my safety,” Lew said.
