Lifestyle // Women's
Free City’s Nina Garduno is Sending Light
Free City casual apparel and accessories are now sold in select Neiman Marcus stores’ On The Go women’s activewear shops. Kate Betts went to the source to pinpoint the appeal of a brand coveted by both the bike-obsessed and the fashion-obsessed.
I remember driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, back in 2007, on a mission to see Nina Garduno’s Free City shop for myself. I’d already seen her now-famous sweatpants and t-shirts in eye-popping color combos, emblazoned with big bold letters and punctuated by a graphic dove. Although Garduno was, and remains, somewhat elusive in the West Coast apparel and retail scene, her first solo shop in the Malibu Country Mart was a de rigeur stop on any tour of Los Angeles from the minute it opened in 2005.
Free City Supermat
What was it about this place that drew people and generated so much chatter? I came to find out, and I, too, was instantly taken by the personality and spirit of the place—something about the free cup of orange juice, the mountain bikes hanging alongside colorful t-shirts, and the old LP covers decorating the plywood walls had an authenticity that no longer existed in similar emporiums. Needless to say, I left the store that day with an armful of $148 t-shirts. (I never said it was cheap.)
Free City Supermat
Free City Supermat
I wasn’t alone in my enchantment. Executives from major retail chains made regular pilgrimages to Free City, hoping to glean merchandising secrets or to define the ineffable spirit of the place so they could replicate it back home. Hidden in the middle of an unremarkable strip mall, Free City, which was entirely built by Garduno and her team, had a rustic, hand-crafted feel: walls made of redwood, bicycles hanging from the ceiling, a tee-pee, bowls of fresh oranges on the counters, and stacks upon stacks of soft t-shirts, sweatpants, and sweatshirts.
Free City Supermat
Garduno has since closed that shop and opened the much bigger Free City Supermät on Hollywood’s Highland Avenue. She has also extended her product assortment to include knit caps, iPhone covers and kids’ t-shirts. She also sells funky stuff like Pyrite she brought back from a trip to Brazil, medals emblazoned with the shop’s tag line, “sending light,” and vintage books such as Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit.” The same spirit guides the new place, a spirit Garduno says was inspired by a visit to the Fristaden Christiania commune in Copenhagen. “It was a commune village, a pot-loving, hippy enclave,” Garduno remembers. “They referred to it as the Free City. I didn’t want to live there, but I wanted to capture that spirit—the idea that you can live off the grid, whether it’s in the Earth Ship Community in New Mexico or as a monk in Big Sur.”
Free City Supermat
It became a mantra for Garduno and she began printing “Free City” on t-shirts as a reminder to herself that she wanted to live “outside the box,” as she puts it. “You can live with that freedom if you remember that you can,” she explains. At the time, Garduno was working as a menswear buyer for a major L.A. boutique, where she helped identify talent like Raf Simons, Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela, and Ann Demeulemeester in the Nineties. Garduno also introduced a private label that involved a lot of what she refers to as “repair,” which is retail speak for bedazzled t-shirts and jeans.
“I’ve always been interested in the seeds of things, the beginning of an idea. What is more that than vintage?” she asks. “Nobody even used the word, vintage, back then. It was all thrift.” Garduno began selling the $1,000 bedazzled jeans and t-shirts and wholesaling them to like-minded boutiques like 10 Corso Como in Milan. Designers caught wind of the funky rock star-inspired merchandise and began shopping the Hollywood store for ideas. In contrast, “the Prada look was popular then,” Garduno remembers, “everything was khaki pants and black t-shirts, no names, very plain.”
Garduno’s unique taste was clearly influential, but after 28 years in retail, she wanted to break away from the fashion system and create something by hand.
“We built the Malibu store all ourselves,” she says referring to the team that helped her. “It was all in a very high standard, it’s an ethic that runs through everything we do—hand touched, and small amounts of things.”
Free City Supermat
Now Garduno has expanded her vision to fill her 3000 square-foot shop that is inspired by the concept of a laundromat—a shared space. “We all come out of the woodwork when there is a place to go,” she says. From her workshop down the block, Garduno makes all of her Free City products, most of them emblazoned with the growing number of slogans like “Sending Light,” “Life Nature Love,” and “Art Yard.” These phrases and symbols emerge out of Garduno’s pen—little icons and words that “stick.” In addition to her own products, Garduno sells other handmade things like Mission bikes, almond milk from LifeFood Organic, and fresh-baked artisan bread from L.A.’s Bread Bar bakery. “I pick everything that is like-minded. I moved the shop here because I wanted to be more accessible, but I’m not going to compromise on the end result,” she explains. “I want to make things people want to keep.”
She doesn’t people to feel intimidated by the prices on her products. “We are not cutting corners, and I do think people pick it up because they’re responding to the care that went into making it. I want people to feel like they can shop here even if they just by a $1 loaf of bread.”
And they do. In addition to the celebrities like Brad Pitt, Janet Jackson and many others who are constantly photographed pumping gas or grocery shopping in the now-ubiquitous Free City sweats, Garduno is constantly receiving photos of her customers wearing their Free City purchases in the most unusual places. “People send me photos from their vacations, from Machu Picchu, from the delivery room!” She laughs. Perhaps, as Garduno would write in one of her slogans, they are just “sending light.”
Free City apparel at Neiman Marcus.
Free City is currently sold at these Neiman Marcus locations: Las Vegas, San Diego, Scottsdale, Dallas Northpark, Bellevue, Houston, St. Louis, Fashion Island, Topanga, Willow Bend and Boca Raton.
