Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles: The Streetwear Block After the Boom

In February 2007 The Hundreds opened its first flagship on Rosewood Avenue, just off Fairfax. Eighteen years later the brand closed its Los Angeles flagship and turned its attention to online sales and retail partners. On his Substack, Bobby Hundreds explained the decision, pointing to a street that had been sliding for years before the pandemic, to empty storefronts up and down the block and to young customers who now prefer to buy online. He also disagreed with the idea that Supreme's departure was the blow that killed the street. Either way, the most important three blocks in West Coast streetwear are not what they were, and that makes this a good moment to understand them.

A deli street first

Before anyone queued on Fairfax for a box logo, they queued for rye bread. The neighborhood grew in part from Jewish families leaving Boyle Heights, east of downtown, as that district changed, and by the early 1960s only New York and Tel Aviv had more Jewish residents than Los Angeles, according to a 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Fairfax became its commercial spine, a run of bakeries, butchers, grocers and delis.

Canter's is the survivor. Ben Canter and his brothers came west from Jersey City in 1931 after their deli there closed, opened first in Boyle Heights and later bought a storefront on North Fairfax. It is still there, and it is still the place to start a walk up the street.

At the south end, Fairfax runs into an older Los Angeles. In July 1934 Fred Beck and Roger Dahlhjelm persuaded E.B. Gilmore to let farmers sell produce from their trucks on a corner of his family's land at Third and Fairfax. The Gilmores had run a dairy there since 1880 and struck oil around 1900. About a dozen farmers turned up, and the Farmers Market has been there since. Its clock tower dates from 1948, and the market's own history page is a fine rabbit hole.

2004 and the land rush

Supreme opened its first West Coast store on Fairfax in 2004, a decade after the brand started in New York. At the time the street was still a quiet run of family businesses. Within a few years it was something else. In a 2019 Complex oral history, a local sneaker boutique owner recalled rents climbing several times over within a few years.

The Hundreds arrived in 2007. Crooks and Castles and Huf followed, and so did a generation of kids who treated the sidewalk as a clubhouse. Members of the Odd Future collective hung around and worked on the street before they were famous, and their presence pulled in an even younger crowd. Release days put a line on the pavement outside Supreme that became part of the street's identity, the product of the same scarcity mechanics we break down in our piece on Supreme and the drop model and in our look at the sneaker resale economy.

Food followed fashion. Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo opened Animal in 2008 and Jon and Vinny's in 2015, and for a while Fairfax was the rare Los Angeles street where you could spend a whole day without getting back in the car. By 2018 the writer of that Los Angeles Review of Books essay counted about 20 streetwear stores on the three central blocks and about five Jewish businesses left.

How the street emptied

The decline came in layers. The pandemic cut foot traffic and pushed buyers online. Rents and costs kept rising. Looting during the 2020 protests damaged stores and gave the block a reputation it has struggled to shake. Animal closed in 2023, the same year Supreme moved its Los Angeles store to the Sunset Strip. The Hundreds followed in 2025.

What is left is a street with gaps in it. Canter's and Jon and Vinny's were still operating in 2025, and Tyler, the Creator's Golf store a block away remains a reason to come. Plenty of storefronts are empty, and the whole block feels like it is waiting for the next idea. For the bigger picture of how Los Angeles fed hip-hop style and vice versa, read our history of how hip-hop rewrote menswear.

How to do Fairfax now

Park once and walk. The core runs roughly from Melrose Avenue down toward Beverly Boulevard, and from there it is a straight shot south to the Farmers Market at Third Street and the museums at Wilshire.

Go hungry. A pastrami sandwich at Canter's is the correct opening move, and the Farmers Market's stalls are better than they need to be. At the far south end, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on September 30, 2021, in Renzo Piano's renovation of the 1939 May Company Building at Wilshire and Fairfax, now called the Saban Building, with his new dome-shaped addition beside it.

Check before you go. Stores on Fairfax have been opening, closing and moving faster than any guide can track, and release-day rules belong to each brand. Look at the brand's own site and social accounts in the week you travel. If the Fairfax story makes you want to see where the template came from, our guides to SoHo in New York and Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku cover the other two corners of the triangle.

For more, browse our streetwear archive, our city guides and the full Travel section.

On the way out, stand for a minute on the stretch where the Supreme line used to form. Twenty years ago this was a quiet block of bakeries and family shops, and it may be quiet again for a while before anyone works out what it becomes next.