LAAMS: An Unexpected Community on the Lower East Side
There’s a lot going on at LAAMS. On the ground floor of the Lower East Side art gallery-fashion showroom-community center, carefully curated vintage pieces hang on clothing racks alongside modern collections from up-and-coming designers. Artworks from a variety of local artists form a sort of patchwork gallery wall, and print materials — everything from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to cannabis cookbooks, to vintage Playboy magazines, to a coffee table book on the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami — line the shelves. Walk up the first flight of stairs and you’re met with racks of reworked, upcycled clothing, a corner where tattoo artist Jerami Goodwin sets up shop, and a space for a rotating art exhibit, which is currently occupied by a project that paired thirteen artists with thirteen incarcerated individuals on the meaning of art and the experience of incarceration. On the third floor, a new women’s boutique shares space with their screenprinting studio, and in-house seamstress Kiara Marie Suero sets up shop there as well.
It might be easy for one to feel intimidated by the effortless cool radiating off every patron and employee. (Even the name has an insider vibe; LAAMS is no acronym, and its definition remains deliberately vague.) But there’s also an air of authenticity and openness to the place that sets even the most fashion-averse at ease. Folks of every stripe wander in and out as if the store is their second home; while it might be an assault on the senses, there’s also a palpable sense of family.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Scott Selvin, the owner and founder of LAAMS, is in the middle of setting a local artist up to sell her work in the store. Selvin runs his shop as a kind of one-stop-shop for local artists and designers to sell their work. But what sets Selvin apart is his recognition of the problematic aspects of the industry — like how gatekept it is — and his commitment to finding a better, more inclusive way. Before founding LAAMS, Selvin spent eight years running the bespoke leather goods brand SR. But fashion has always been more than a job for him. Selvin grew up as a regular in the sneaker lines where he would wait in anticipation of the newest drop, finding community at mainstays like Alife and Supreme. These places became more than just stores to Selvin; they were locales to meet like-minded individuals. But over the years, Selvin watched streetwear transform into something commodified and corporate. Smaller shops that supported up-and-coming artists were fewer and farther between, and higher price points and big-name collaborations dominated the industry. “It felt like it was no longer for us,” Selvin tells me as we head outside the shop, where visitors greet him with fist-bumps. “You don’t want kids feeling like they have to spend two hundred dollars to fit in.”
That’s where LAAMS came in. The community center opened a year and a half ago, in April 2020, just as the pandemic arrived — hardly a good time to open a brick and mortar retail business. But while traditional stores faced supply challenges, Selvin and his friends and colleagues had a fully-stocked store on day one. “Luckily for us, the majority of our product had been previously collected for fifteen years,” he says. They also wanted to make sure that LAAMS didn’t reify the barriers that keep so many people out of the fashion industry. They wanted to try to offer things at a variety of price points and to focus on the quality of an item’s design rather than the name attached to it. “There are so many gatekeepers,” Selvin says, “and the process to get placed in stores is really prohibitive. When you’re really young, you don’t have the education from a fashion school. There’s no guidance. And then [there’s the issue of] just straight money.”
Selvin is intimately familiar with how cutthroat breaking into the industry can be, and he wanted to build not just a boutique, but a community offering mentorship and guidance. “Short of having a mentor, you’re not going to get feedback. And that can cause you to fail on your first drop. And then that kid has to go get a 9 to 5, and we never find out what that could’ve turned into. We talk a lot here about how much lost art there is in the city, for reasons like that. So we wanted to put out a space where at least less of that amazing potential goes undiscovered.”
Selvin also emphasized the importance of having a physical space in the neighborhood, a rarity in a market increasingly dominated by online sales. “It’s so much easier to see something in person -- touch it, feel it, appreciate it. And that’s why we welcome people from off the street to show us their stuff. We don’t ask for their Instagram account or their numbers; it’s purely based on design and whether the price is fair. And then if it’s not quite there yet we make sure that we’re not just saying no. We always give our two cents on how to get it there.”
That mentoring is just one piece of the puzzle for LAAMS. Since opening, they’ve helped community members register to vote, hosted a coat drive, put on events for kids in the neighborhood, and worked with a local organization on addiction recovery and safe drug use. “It’s becoming a place to go, to link up, to meet people and get ideas,” he says. In this way, LAAMS is much more than just another vintage boutique. In a world that is often reserved exclusively for the wealthy and well-connected, it’s a community.
