Meet the LA designer who celebrates Chicano couture

Bryan Escareño’s foray into fashion was the result of happenstance. In 2018, the designer, who was born and raised in Venice, California, bought a green vintage Singer sewing machine at a garage sale determined to learn to make the perfect pair of denim pants.

“In my head, I was like, ‘I want to make a pair of pants. How hard can it be?’” the 35-year-old Mexican American says. “I’m so glad that I was that naive and that stubborn but also that delusional!” He began honing his sewing skills, eventually crafting cut-and-sew flannel shirts that caught the eye of his colleagues at LA’s Wasteland, a high-end resale boutique.

In 2020, he launched Amor Prohibido and quickly has amassed a cult following thanks to its unique aesthetic, which is heavily informed by LA’s Chicano urban subculture of the ’90s and 2000s. “I grew up in a time when, if you wore Dickies and Nike Cortez sneakers, you were automatically put in the box of a cholo,” he says. “If you were a brown kid in a white T-shirt or a flannel, you were called a cholo. What I’m trying to do (with Amor Prohibido) is to take what society deemed as negative and turn it into (elevated) fashion.”