Mike Amiri is in Paris to premiere the latest runway episode of his brand’s globally alluring evocation of Hollywood fantasy, sex appeal and glamour. This season, however, he is also thinking hard about LA’s current reality. “It’s tragic,” he says of this month’s devastating wildfires. Like many thousands of others, Amiri and his family were forced to evacuate their home. “We were fortunate,” he says, their house was spared. His priority when leaving, he adds, “was making sure my family and the dog were fine. Beyond that, there were some photos that I’m nostalgic for. That was it.”
When discussing the aftermath, he says: “It has reminded us that LA is a community. So many people have come together, helping individually and through organisations. Everyone was checking on everyone. That is the best of LA. And, you know, LA is where you build things, and you dream. So now we will dream and rebuild.”
Amiri’s love for Los Angeles, his nostalgia-laced vision and his instinct to build are the foundations upon which his eponymous brand has blossomed. He founded Amiri in 2014, first showed in Paris in 2018 and has since built a $300-million annual business with 300 employees globally — of whom around 100 are in LA, 35 in Milan and 160 spread across a current network of 27 stores that is due to grow to 30 by the end of this year. “Ten years ago, we were three people in a basement. But that’s what Hollywood’s about, right?” As well as founder, he is chairman and chief creative officer.
Revenues are projected to grow in the next 12 months, Amiri continues, before adding: “But I don’t see Amiri as a one-year brand or a 10-year brand — I see it as a 100-year brand. Every decision we make is with the idea that this is a house that will grow through time. So where do we progress, where do we evolve, how do we diversify?”
This season’s steps towards building a 22nd century fashion house include reintroducing womenswear (currently around 15 per cent of the business) to the runway. A new range of Japanese-made eyewear — “Very Jack Nicholson,” he says as I try on some yellow-lensed aviators — is both a retail proposition and a form of positive visualisation. “We’re going to have global eyewear distribution one day, so let’s build the fundamentals for that,” Amiri says. Other future categories he is manifesting include fragrance and cosmetics.
In 2019, Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group invested an undisclosed sum in the brand in return for a minority stake in the company, which remains independent. Says Amiri: “If anything, it’s helped me dream bigger watching Renzo steer his ship and seeing how big he thinks.”
The following year, Amiri became the first American luxury fashion brand since Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren to open on Rodeo Drive. “Us opening on the main filet of the strip and doing the top 10 per cent of our whole block as far as business was really for me proof of concept. The formula works,” he says. “And we’re still new to retail. We’re still learning visual merchandising, clienteling, software, IT. It’s such a science, and the fact that we don’t know it really well but we’re still doing well is exciting.”
The rigour of Amiri’s approach to business stems, in part, from the degree he earned from Loyola Law School in LA. However, his passions drew him first to the music business, where he started out creating custom-made pieces for musician clients including Axl Rose and Justin Bieber. He took that basement studio space under a Thai restaurant on Sunset Boulevard — “Everything is still there, patterns, cutting tables, mannequins, I’m never letting that go” — and started building his business. In 2014, he launched a capsule at Maxfield. In around 2015, I remember a buyer from Selfridges telling me about him as “this guy from LA who takes great denim out to Joshua Tree [National Park] and fires buckshot at it to get a weathered effect”.
As a teenage skater at Beverly Hills High School and a fake-ID wielding habitue of venues such as The Viper Room, Amiri’s formative aesthetic was grunge-tinted, counter-cultural and rocky, and that is what defined his first seven years or so of design. He built a great T-shirt business, too, a category that served to advertise the Amiri name alongside emergent luxury streetwear labels including Palm Angels and Off-White.
At the turn of this decade, however, he began to lean into a new maturity, referring further back in time and transitioning from grunge and streetwear to glamour. He says: “We didn’t know we could do tailoring until we actually really put it on the runway and were intentional about it. Then, in 2024, we did 100 red carpet looks, all suiting. Four years before that, it was all sports tunnels and concerts, you know? This intentionality is going to be a big focus for me over the next few years as we scale the house.”
The company recently signed on a 26,000-square-metre space in Milan’s Brera district from which to headquarter its sourcing and manufacturing operations in Italy. “Our soul is in Los Angeles, and we still produce a good amount of our denim and our jersey in the city,” he tells me. “You can’t replicate that soulfulness elsewhere. But when you’re talking about tailoring, fine accessories, small leather goods, certain knitwear categories, you need to be at the source of luxury.”
In recent seasons, Amiri has leaned heavily into old Hollywood, referencing jazz and rat pack-era tropes of America with increasing elan and wit. His ’90s-formed lens remains, but as the filter, rather than a point of focus. Instead, that focus is levelled, seasoning his cross-generational LA-rooted inspirations into a recipe that resonates now.
Tonight’s collection will be personal across two generations of Amiris. Mike’s Iranian parents immigrated to LA in the late 1960s. Recently, while going through old family pictures, he found some photos of his father in Hollywood during the ’70s. “And I thought: ‘Wow, this is pretty cool.’ It felt pretty funny looking back and seeing your dad as cool. So I started to think about the connection between the Hollywood he knew, and the Hollywood I knew,” he says.
On a set built to evoke canonical Hollywood spots including Jumbo’s bikini bar and the Formosa Cafe, Amiri will serve up his freshest fusion of nostalgic California luxe seasoned towards a contemporary aesthetic. He says: “I want the audience to feel as if they are immersed in the world, rather than sitting outside it looking in.” That instinct to immerse reflects the timescale of his ambition. “That’s why I use the 100-year marker. You want to create something that is so complete, where the identity is so authentic and true to itself that it can live beyond you in its own way.”
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