Ghosts of Fashion

Chances are, if you regularly view fashion editorials, you’ve seen an old, stuck-in-the 1950s, ghost-town-like set known at the Four Aces. Maybe you’ve even declared how tired you’ve become with yet another lonely desert theme that looks exactly like the last lonely desert theme.   And chances are you might be right, they do look the same because they were all shot at the Four Aces.

The first few times I saw editorials shot there, sure, they looked cool.  Really cool. But with each new one I saw,  I grew bored and critical of editors who couldn’t put their creative talent to use to find something new.  Something different.  Something not that.

But then, literally one day, I had a change of heart.  The Four Aces suddenly became, after all the repetition, special.  It became an iconic location for fashion shoots.  Places like Paris or NYC are iconic of course too—way iconic.  But they’re known and are famous for many different reasons.  Fashion editorials may use and enjoy Paris’ iconic-ness, but so too can a tourist post-card or a bus tour travel brochure.

But the Four Aces?  Fashion has that all to itself.  Or just about, as movie productions sometimes use it too, but in a disguised and dressed up way. 

Fashion uses it just as it sits there, as a little oasis of cool in the hot desert.  And as each new year brings new collections on by the Four Aces for a visit, they join the collective remnants of past years’ collections there,  soon to join them as ghosts of fashion seasons past.