It was where Paris and Lindsay shopped for Von Dutch hats and Juicy sweat suits. Now its owner is pushing something even more popular: conspiracies. bridgetgillard reports
Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photos: Buzzfoto/FilmMagic; Jean-Paul Aussenard/WireImage; WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo; Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Everything old is new again,” Kitson owner Fraser Ross said with a sigh over the phone from West Hollywood in August.
Kitson is still Kitson, Ross, 57, confirms, but a righteous Kitson, a Kitson with a purpose. “A lot of people don’t want Kitson to evolve,” he says of the transformation in his branding, which one could describe, in terms of audience, as going from Us Weekly to Newsmax. “Some people want me to go back to the days of celebrities, paparazzi.” But others, Ross claims, a new group of activist customers, are thanking him for doing “the work of God.
Kitson married the high and the low in what People’s Revolution PR-firm founder Kelly Cutrone describes as “bling-ring leisurewear.” It was luxurious and bohemian, decadent and sloppy. “It was grab-and-go fashion. It didn’t take itself too seriously,” Cutrone says. With brands like Wildfox, Ed Hardy, and Rebel Yell piled on its tables like a flea market, Kitson was more democratic than Fred Segal, Saks, and Barneys. “Kitson was just like the Statue of Liberty of L.A. fashion wannabes.
The next year was horrifically life-altering for Ross, he says, after a dental procedure left him with an infection so severe he was in a medically induced coma for two weeks at Cedars-Sinai. According to Ross, the business suffered in his absence, and in a lawsuit he filed in 2016, he claimed that during his recovery, Lee “seized on” his vulnerability, encouraging him to turn down a $26 million offer from Tengram, the private-equity firm, in 2013.
The ordeal left Ross feeling as if he had lost a child. He had grown Kitson, to which he gave his middle name, from nothing; Ross says he grew up partially in an orphanage after being “abandoned by my parents at a young age.” When he reopened in his old space in 2016 as Kitross, many vendors refused to return. He eventually operated as Kitson again in 2018 after paying California $158,000 in back taxes.
The exchange prompted an ongoing campaign, with Ross posting repeated demands for apologies from Atkin, Teigen, and the CEOs of Alliance Consumer Growth, a private-equity firm with a stake in Ouai and in Skims . “Investment companies have to take a moral stance when ignorant founders and executives mock looting,” Ross wrote. Neither Teigen nor Atkin will comment on the issue.
Ross maintains he is not a political person; as a Canadian citizen, he can’t even vote in the U.S. He reminds me that one of Kitson’s Valentine’s Day windows said “I ❤️ you even though you’re a Democrat” and the other “I ❤️ you even though you’re a Republican.” He simply has a profound sense of injustice on behalf of America’s small-business owners — a sentiment shared in the recall movement by a cohort of wealthy California conservatives .
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