Worn in the USA

LAS VEGAS--These blister-causing floors are not made for walking in high-glam Jimmy Choos. Just look at the feet of the nearly 80,000 fashion hounds here on the hunt for next spring’s newest looks at this biannual clothing convention. They’re in sneakers and flip-flops, jeans and shorts, tank tops and more tank tops. After all, it’s 104 degrees outside.

New York, Milan and Paris may have their runways, but when it comes to fashion for the masses, the MAGIC trade show is the biggest draw in the West. Held at the Las Vegas Convention Center and Sands Expo, the four-day event, which ended Thursday, featured 3,000 exhibitors offering everything from street wear to the latest in corporate office style.

Mostly, looks were knockoffs of each other and repeats of the last several seasons: ethnic-inspired tops, vintage wear, garments made to look handmade (crocheting and patch-worked) and lots of low-rise suede and rawhide-embellished denim for both men and women.

MAGIC, an acronym for the Men’s Apparel Guild in California, is now almost 70 years old and just isn’t about clothing for guys anymore. There also was plenty of junior contemporary and young women’s brands.

When store buyers weren’t browsing or placing orders, they partied with exhibitors and others, attending an endless stream of hyped events during the day and night that featured an opening night concert by the band Counting Crows, appearances from rappers, free booze and dancing at various Las Vegas Strip hotels and casinos, where often, impromptu partying broke out at crap tables.

The most popular new wave of denim washes and treatments is tagged “wrinkling.” Jeans are coated with a resin on the top front and at the back knee and then baked, resulting in a permanent wrinkle.

Native Angeleno designer and former lawyer Bobby Benveniste goes a step further with his denim treatments for his Eisbar line by shirring jeans along the side at the knees and embroidering back pockets.

Benveniste and partner, Kiernan Lambeth, were here to kick off their label’s new women’s line. On Tuesday, “we wrote our first order. Being here is really the only way to reach national and international traffic,” said Benveniste. “More important is that we’re getting a lot of attention from Japanese buyers. They take L.A. style and fashion very seriously. For them, shopping is a hobby, and they love low-rise and vintage aesthetics.”

Think big, says L.A. designer Freddie Rojas, who creates a line called Private. He was doing brisk business with buyers interested in his new larger and plus sizes for men and women.

“I’m doing this for my hip-hop boys with 38-and 40-inch waists who come up to me and say, ‘I’m too big to wear your clothes. Make clothes that we can wear too.’ So I did,” said Rojas, who operates a Melrose Avenue boutique.

For the coming spring, he says he’ll also have looks for women in sizes 12 and larger “because fashion has to be about what’s real out there.”

As if there were not enough neon and blinking lights in this city, Jerry Phlippeau, president of Flipo Group Limited, still drew mobs of buyers and looky-loos to his booth that tripped the light fantastic. Phlippeau, a former musician with the L.A. band Bad Box, now sells blinking light accessories for hair, rings on fingers, pins for jeans’ jackets, bracelets, watches and pierced ears.

“Our band used to play at the Cathouse in the late ‘80s, Club Lingerie, the Roxy. Man, I love L.A.,” says the suited businessman, who began his Flipo brand five years ago after he created bicycle safety lights he glued onto a body and showed them off at an L.A. club.

On Sept. 16 he plans on selling 100,000 pairs of blinking Flipo earrings ($8 to $10) when he makes his first QVC appearance.

If the clothes are good enough for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, why not Fred Segal?

New Yorker Michael Spiewak, whose firm designs outerwear for 71,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, has made that connection: His uniform-inspired street clothes are sold at the trendy Southland boutique.

“We started selling to the L.A. sheriff’s force in the early 1970s,” Spiewak said, adding that the last time he outfitted the force with new outerwear was about five years ago. “And I have to tell you, those men and women out there are the handsomest bunch of people.”

The company, which will send out a spring line of funky T-shirts and Boy and Girl Scout-inspired shirts adorned with merit patches, moved into street-wear apparel in the mid-1990s “because it was just a natural progression for us. It was a time when down jackets became popular.”

In fact, Spiewak recalls how designer Randolph Duke placed an order for him to create the bulky, bulbous jackets a few years ago that the designer then put over evening gowns.

Says Spiewak: “You gotta love fashion.”