Los Angeles designer Lizzie Grover Rad invited friends into her tony West Hollywood home Wednesday night for dinner and the launch of her fourth collection, titled “Corporate Corruption: Deal With the Devil.”
Thirteen Lune founder Nyakio Grieco; AnOnlyChild designer Maxwell Osbourne; Jen Wonders Studio founder Jen Azoulay; chef Camilla Marcus; fashion sourcer Gab Waller; Art Production Fund director Casey Fremont, and fashion entrepreneur and influencer Tania Sarin were among those gathered at the art-filled home wearing the two-year-old brand’s thoughtful designs, which have tackled social issues such as reproductive rights (season one), the billionaire space race (season two), the eternal quest for youth (season three) and now the wolves of Wall Street.
“America has turned into a corporato-cracy with all the greed and abuse of power, and I thought it’d be interesting to talk about,” said the designer, who has never worked in a corporate world herself, and looked at it as an outsider.
She researched the rise and fall of civilizations after the accumulation of extreme wealth, especially Europe and in the Medieval merchant era, all the way up to Wall Street in the 1920s and ’30s.
A pair of jeans features a print that’s the front page of the Los Angeles Times from Oct. 30, 1929, after the stock market crashed, and a silk skirt and top were patch worked in graphics including a ’30s oil painting of Wall Street tycoons.
She used cultural depictions of evil as graphics on mesh sets, tube top sand dresses, including three-headed roosters, the gates of hell, dragons and monsters adapted from etchings and artwork by Gustave Dore, Albert Weisgerber and Nikolai Konstantinovich, giving the pieces a collectible quality.
“The wolves of Wall Street and the gender bias in corporate America kept coming up, which took me to the unexpected use of wolves in Little Red Riding Hood. There’s actually a huge underground world of Little Red Riding Hood porn,” Rad said of some of the more cheeky images that appear on the lining of a coat.
Grover Rad has found the casual silhouettes that work for her customers, and also delivered sharp chocolate brown suiting, which was new, alongside her exquisite-quality hand-beaded pieces and statement coats.
Sold direct-to-consumer through the designer’s website, the brand has doubled sales every season, and Rad is looking for the right partner to launch retail.
Prices are $120 for a T-shirt to $1,995 for a coat, and she’s aware of the irony of simultaneously selling to — and poking at — the .01 percent. She said, “I would like to think that the wearer is aware of it, too.”
