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A year on from the fires that devastated Los Angeles, Vogue Business takes stock of fashion’s recovery and rebuilding efforts as part of our series, Refashioning LA, assessing where the city’s fashion and apparel industry is headed in 2026.
One year ago today, Elyse Walker evacuated three of her Los Angeles stores — two in the Palisades and one in Calabasas. “It’s been our hardest year of business. After Covid, I never thought I’d say that again, but it’s been a really crazy year,” Walker tells me towards the end of 2025. “Pacific Palisades was our baby. That’s where the entire Elyse Walker brand started.”
The Elyse Walker store was one of 7,000 structures that burned down across the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires that ripped through the hills of Los Angeles on January 7, 2025. Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) one year on, the impact is unmissable; stilts stand along the beachside where houses used to be. Some are still dotted along, most neighborless. In the hills, the landscape remains barren. Many plots of land are, however, populated with building signs staked to the ground. Some have wood framing going up. “It feels painful. There’s a pain in us from it, and we’ve been devastated by this fire,” says Nina Garduno, founder of LA brand Free City. “It was as bad as it looked.”
It’s been one year since the fires raged across the Los Angeles hills. In the weeks that followed, the media tracked the events closely, but coverage slowed as the dramatic imagery and stories spilling out of the city gave way to a new, unexpected — and unwanted — reality for many LA locals. As the world stopped watching, those on the ground knuckled down, banding together to work through the logistical nightmares that followed: how to deal with insurance; assessing the impact on physical and mental health; and now, figuring out the logistics of permits for rebuilding. “People pay attention right after. But it happens in phases: immediate, intermediate, and then the long term,” says Kikka Hanazawa, co-founder of nonprofit organization Fashion Girls for Humanity. Now, in this intermediate phase, those who lost their homes and businesses are gearing up to rebuild what was lost.
The fashion industry — in and beyond LA — has rallied to support. In the immediate aftermath, LA brands banded together to gather donations for those who had lost their homes. Then-14-year-old Avery Colvert created the donation site Altadena Girls, specifically for teenage victims of the Eaton fire. In October last year, Vogue World: Hollywood raised $4.5 million for the Entertainment Community Fund to support members of the LA costume community impacted by the fires. That same month, Fashion Girls for Humanity raised money to support rebuilding efforts via an online auction. Up for grabs were two tickets to a Thom Browne show, as well as a meeting with Shopbop’s senior fashion director, Caroline Maguire.
“They’re pretty broad, experience-based auctions that we’ve been doing for a little while, and it’s been successful. This time we probably raised over $100,000,” says Hanazawa, who co-founded the organization alongside Julie Gilhart, Miki Higasa, and Tomoko Ogura in 2011 in response to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Since then, they’ve raised funds for a number of disaster relief efforts. The money raised for the fire recovery will be given in grants to schools around the Palisades and Altadena. “We like tangible results, actually building something,” Hanazawa says. “Whatever we can do to bridge between the emergency and immediate needs and long-term needs.”
Hanazawa, who lives in the Palisades, recalls the day the fires started. “We’re in a wildfire-prone area. Every year, we have warnings, saying there might be wildfires, but oftentimes the firefighters manage to control the fire, and then it’s fine. But January 7, it was different.” She was meant to have a meeting at 11am, but received a photo of an ultra-backed-up PCH beforehand. “Within 30 minutes, my street was jammed with cars. I’m like, OK, this is not the same as a regular wildfire. We need to evacuate.” Hanazawa went back home the next day. Her house wound up surviving, but many of her neighbors’ did not. “I saw a lot of homes that were just burning without any firefighters or people. Nobody was stopping the fire from spreading. I’ve never seen anything like that,” she says.
Walker is now reconciling what it means to have lost her ‘work home’, if not her actual home. “Having lost the little baby that was the footprint and the platform for all our other stores was something unfathomable,” she says. “But when people lose their homes — 7,000 structures burnt down, and I am going to imagine north of 6,000 of them were homes — it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself. You didn’t lose your home.”
At the time of the fires, Elyse Walker’s two Palisades stores made up 45% of sales and 48% of profit, Walker says. In order to keep the business afloat — and keep as many of her sales associates working as possible — Walker kept about 80% of orders. She’s finishing the year down just 16-18% in sales and about 10% in profit. “We were pretty bold, and we were very lucky,” she says.
It will be a long time before things are back to normal. “Everything was lost overnight. Your dentist, your restaurants, coffee shops, schools, your friends’ homes, they were all gone,” Hanazawa says. “That really tore our community apart.” Many of her neighbors haven’t returned, even those whose homes survived. Some have moved out of the LA area altogether.
It’s, in part, why Elyse Walker is opening back up in the Palisades this summer. “Rick [Caruso] called me and said, Elyse, I know you’re looking around — we were trying to find a location in Santa Monica or Brentwood to get our team back to their work home — but I have an idea,” Walker recalls. He wanted Walker to join his rebuilding efforts. It was the first time she’d cried since the fires, she says. “We built the Palisades for 25 years, and now I know what my next 25 years will be.”
The fallout
This time last year, brands were scrambling to navigate first the safety of their employees and acquaintances, then the immediate fallout for their businesses. Now, media coverage has largely moved on, but those on the ground are still in the thick of post-fire recovery efforts.
Rebuilding is a slow process. “There is a lot of red tape,” Hanazawa says, noting that zoning and policy changes make it hard to get rebuilds approved, let alone started. The first home was only authorised to rebuild in the Palisades in December, and was already under construction prior to the fires, so it already had some of the necessary building approvals.
It’s tough on the communities impacted, she adds. A year isn’t a long time, and there’s a long road ahead. “Mental health issues are something I’m very concerned about,” she says. Hanazawa isn’t alone in this concern. As rebuilding in the physical sense begins to progress, locals are thinking about the mental toll the past year has taken on those impacted by the fires.
To this end, in October, Altadena Girls opened a new, permanent space in Pasadena’s Old Town neighborhood. It’s a means of supporting teens in the Altadena community who no longer have familiar, pre-fire spaces like their homes and schools to go to. The permanent space has a free boutique with ‘dignity-first’ essentials (including feminine products), a multi-purpose room, and activity-specific rooms such as a music studio and podcast space. “I had people tell me, ‘Coming here right now feels so therapeutic to me. I want to come back tomorrow.’ I truly think in such a chaotic time, girls, we just wanted some peace of mind and to have some fun and be with some friends,” Colvert told Vogue at the time of opening. “After the fires destroyed our community, it’s really important that we have a space to go just to be ourselves without any extra pressure to do anything or be anything or act a certain way.”
As brands explore the logistics of reopening in 2026, many are still dealing with insurance claims. Most of the Palisades Village’s tenants, which included brands from Bottega Veneta and Saint Laurent to Alo and Aesop, are still focused on remediation and working with their insurance companies, says Corinne Verdery, CEO of real estate company Caruso, which owns the property. Walker filed quickly with insurance company The Hartford last year. “We were claim number one for the LA fires,” she says, which started on a Tuesday. “We were already looking at spaces by Friday.”
Given that the Palisades Village remained standing, thanks in part to owner Rick Caruso’s private crews of firefighters, it’s in a better spot than most businesses to begin its rebuild. Sixty-six percent of Caruso’s marketplace remained unscathed, Verdery says. Many brands are now focusing on whether to remediate the smoke and/or water damage or do further renovations. Caruso is taking a “conservative approach”, Verdery says, gutting most of the spaces that it owns and redoing the common areas, down to the soil. “We want everyone to feel safe coming back,” she says.
For Walker, there were some unexpected bright spots to come out of the disaster. For one, she opened a temporary Hamptons space to redirect inventory (and employees) from the Palisades stores. It went so well that she’s now opening a permanent Southampton store. (The store’s second month was the highest-grossing for the company, beating out large stores like Madison Avenue and Newport Beach.) She’s also pleased that teams in other stores, such as Newport Beach, got to see the seasoned Palisades sellers in action, she says.
This will shape how Elyse Walker operates this year onward — not rotating each month, but implementing some sort of program for employees to store swap. “When we get back to normal within the next 12 months, we don’t want to lose all of what we learned about this rotation and learning from each other,” she says. “Because getting a weekly recap or a monthly recap is different than living it.”
Starting over
The Palisades Village is set to reopen next August. Caruso’s Verdery says that the company has recently shifted gears. “We’ve turned the corner from recovery and remediation to excitement about reopening and bringing this community back together,” she says. The company is treating it as a brand new project, she adds. Walker has been helping Caruso to get some brands back to the Palisades, and to bring in new names, also. “A couple” of brands that had leases pre-fires are still undecided, Walker says. In December, Erewhon announced its return to the neighborhood on Instagram, confirming that it is beginning its remodel.
Hanazawa is unsure how quickly foot traffic can recover. “The whole area burned down except for Caruso’s Village. So I don’t know. It’s going to take five to seven years at least for the town to recover,” she says. “I hope people will go back and start shopping, no matter where they’re located, but we would have to work on rebuilding homes in that area. Otherwise, the traffic will not be easy to return.”
Even once rebuilding begins, it is not a given that previous residents will move back, Hanazawa adds. “The reality is it takes a long time, and for a lot of young families with kids, once they settle into a different town, different city, different schools; once you start making new friends, it’s not easy to go back again — even if your house is rebuilt,” she says. “So the reality is that the community was lost. Probably many people are not coming back.”
Still, some Palisades tenants have already been asking about the reopening date, Verdery says. “It definitely changed after the summer [in 2025]. People with just smoke damage or water damage got their homes remediated and moved back in, so the momentum and the conversation shifted to ‘can you get reopened sooner than next summer?’”
Walker is also confident that LA residents will make the trek as a show of support, whether or not they’re living in the area. “I really believe LA will come out and drive over the 405, maybe through a bit of traffic, to support all of us,” she says. Caruso is implementing incentives to attract visitors, including a new restaurant from chef and Mozza Restaurant Group co-owner Nancy Silverton. “She does not have a restaurant on the Westside. So folks on the Westside are really excited to come and visit her — and not have to drive across the 405 to visit her at the Melrose location,” Verdery adds.
Ultimately, people will want to check in on how things are going, Walker expects. “If nothing else, people are going to want to go up there and say, what the heck’s going on up here?”
Smaller, independent businesses face a longer road ahead, left to rebuild from the ground up. Still, Garduno is optimistic. “I have faith [the city] will bloom again. In Malibu, you see what was going to happen with new shopping areas and things going on there, and everything just kind of stopped,” she says. “But I think this summer and maybe next summer, it’ll be back in a humble, but really beautiful way.”
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