You might not realize it until you're stuck in traffic on the 101, halfway through a whirlwind odyssey that spans a pop-up dance party in Westlake and a benefit in Bel-Air, all in an earnest attempt to understand Los Angeles's emerging fashion scene, that there's something very New York about the whole effort. Angelenos aren't particularly concerned with the zeitgeist; there's always another wave, after all. Which is one reason the fashion industry, with its rhetoric of the new and the on-trend, never put much stock in L.A. Suddenly, though, something legitimately fashiony seems to be happening here. In the years since the hometown hero Rick Owens surfed off to Paris on a wave of gray cashmere and leather, the City That Sleeps Just Fine has undergone a style awakening. A vanguard of fashion types from points east are taking the reverse trip in droves, quietly making a home (or at least a second home) in Los Angeles, joining a cadre of beloved and critically respected designers that includes Rodarte's Mulleavy sisters, Band of Outsiders" Scott Sternberg and Greg Chait of the Elder Statesman. The trend seems to have begun, as so many have before, with Tom Ford, who decamped to his Richard Neutra-designed spread in Bel-Air after parting ways with Gucci a decade ago, and wound up making his film debut with the Oscar-nominated "A Single Man." Hot on his heels was the post-Dior Hedi Slimane, who touched down in 2007, camera in hand, to document the local inhabitants (an exhibition of his photographs, "California Song," opened at the Los Angeles MOCA in 2011) and never left. When the men's-wear star was hired as the new creative director of Saint Laurent last year, he opted to remain in L.A., flying out his Paris staff at regular intervals. The move stunned the fashion world - as have his very rock n" roll, L.A.-tinged collections - but it seems to have struck a chord. Recently, Diane von Furstenberg invited local fashionistas to a getting-to-know-you luncheon at her place in Coldwater Canyon and declared her intention to spend more time in town. John Galliano is said to be plotting a move here. Daphne Guinness has been actively house-hunting. Mario Testino and Steven Meisel have places here. Raf Simons and Nicolas Ghesquière and Riccardo Tisci are regular visitors. So are Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. Daft Punk is here. "East L.A. is all French now," marvels Natalie Portman at a benefit for her husband Benjamin Millepied's L.A. Dance Project. When we're in Paris, everyone is on their way to L.A. It wasn't always this way. Indeed, for Angelenos, a serious career in fashion has typically begun with a call to United Van Lines. "I had to move to New York to be taken seriously," says Eva Chow, a former designer and social pillar on the West Coast. There was a certain stigma when a person was working out of Los Angeles in those days. But now, she adds, the city has "a real cool factor." So what if Los Angeles is still better known for implants than outerwear? Or if it still hasn't apologized for popularizing spandex, man jewelry and the Ugg boot? Never mind. Rents are cheap! The light is amazing! The beach! The mountains! The avocados! "A lot of designers have chosen to live here, who in a different time would have perhaps gone to live in New York," says the longtime fashion executive Katherine Ross, who arrived in 2006 with her husband, Michael Govan, when he was hired as the new director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - an event that has dramatically invigorated the local art scene. There's something about being here that seems to help their work. Nobody goes out much - if they really wanted to go out, they'd be in New York - but when they do, the style set flocks to places like Giorgio's, a weekly "70s disco party at the Standard in West Hollywood, where a recent evening found David LaChapelle swing-dancing with the model agent Omar Alberto, while Dita Von Teese commandeered a banquette and Erin Wasson and Jody Watley boogied nearby. Or A Club Called Rhonda, a roving party that draws a gay-straight alliance of dance-floor utopians, neo club kids and, on occasion, style stars like Sky Ferreira, Nicola Formichetti and Slimane himself, a music obsessive and connoisseur of youth culture, observing quietly from a perch in the corner. Fashion is not an altogether natural fit for Los Angeles, a town more or less founded in opposition to the compulsive one-upmanship and rigid hierarchies that rule the industry. This isn't to say L.A. doesn't have real style, which is something very different. Its signature style just happens to be a sort of antistyle. Southern California, after all, is the place that turned comfort into a spiritual doctrine, the place you went to discard your clothes and run barefoot into the surf. New York dresses up, L.A. dresses down. New York is tailored, L.A. is flowy. Its official uniform might as well be the supersoft T-shirt and jeans, followed closely by the maxi dress. Such apparel might come off as a tad low-key sashaying down a runway, but it's a look. And though hard-core fashion types will scoff, L.A.-based companies like Guess, American Apparel, Juicy Couture, Forever 21 and the new e-commerce entry Nasty Gal have built empires that dwarf better-respected luxury lines. Even in a young city like Los Angeles, there are those with long memories, people who will remind you that Hollywood practically invented glamour, name-checking costume designers like Adrian and Edith Head. But even at its most chic, the industry was viewed with a sidelong glance by New York sophisticates. "In the name of God, Diana," Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970s, beseeched Diana Vreeland when she proposed an exhibition based on the Golden Age looks of Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh, "why are we dragging Hollywood into the Metropolitan?" The legendary former editor of Vogue got her way, but Hollywood's relationship to the larger fashion world remained fraught. The demise of the studio system in the 1950s meant celebrities had to dress themselves, with sometimes dire results. "When they didn't have anyone to hand-hold them through their appearances, people got really scary looking," observes Cameron Silver, founder of the Decades vintage shop. Things have improved dramatically with the rise of the celebrity stylist. The red carpet got cleaned up. These days, Hollywood sometimes seems less adept at making movies than it is at churning out a parade of walking luxury billboards - still quaintly known as celebrities. Whatever you call them, it's increasingly clear that the high-end collections that make their debuts each season in New York and Europe would be lost without them. Preening hand-on-hip before the step-and-repeats - their images amplified and refracted by an infinity of style blogs - L.A."s stars have become critical in building and maintaining a line's brand identity. So great is the marketing power of modern celebrity that a Jessica Simpson, whose 2009 misadventure with a pair of high-waisted jeans still provokes gasps of horror in some circles, can helm a brand that now takes in an estimated $1 billion in annual revenue. And Kim Kardashian can go from sex-tape stardom to expanding a retail chain, a few fashion lines and a range of fragrances. High-end designers are fond of saying they're choosy about whom they lend their clothes to, but just about all of them do it. At this point the fashion industry and Hollywood seem to be locked in a sensual if vaguely hostile tango, with influential celebrity stylists playing referee or, increasingly, cutting right in. Rachel Zoe, Andrea Lieberman, L'Wren Scott and Kate Young are among those who've gone from pulling clothes for celebrities to designing their own lines, often with an assist from reality TV. Los Angeles's burgeoning fashion ecosystem - democratic, bootstrappy, upbeat and sometimes wantonly improvisational - seems to be drawing power from several sources, including still-plentiful real estate, a local buzz vacuum caused by the sputtering of the movie industry, creative runoff from the town's exploding art scene and an emerging sense that sometime in the last few years, New York ceased being a locus of inventive energy and gritty potential and turned into a luxury shopping mall where the proverbial kid from the sticks with sequins in her eyes has to foam milk for 14 hours a day just to make rent. It's noteworthy that Ford wound up making his foray into another art form after becoming an Angeleno: you can do that here. It's a more forgiving environment. And the cross-pollination between the worlds of fashion, music and art shows a promiscuity that more siloed New Yorkers rarely experience, perhaps as a result of a shared outsider status that haunts anyone in L.A. who is not in movies. In any case, everyone seems to be doing stuff, taking chances: opening a lovingly curated books-and-apparel shop in a cavernous new gallery space operated by the painter Laura Owens and the gallerist Gavin Brown (Wendy Yao of Ooga Booga); producing an appealingly dorky pirate radio show that practically nobody knows about (the Mulleavy sisters); or creating a line of eyewear as a bit of canny performance art (Alex Israel). And then there's Tommy Perse, the legendary retail impresario behind the haute cabinet of curiosities Maxfield, who recently erected a demountable vintage Jean Prouvé house in the parking lot, just for fun. Unlike New York and Paris, where it can feel as if everything has been done, the territory all staked out, Los Angeles is still the kind of place where you can stumble on an Art Deco building on a sketchy side street - perhaps a building that once served as the headquarters of Howard Hughes and still has the walk-in safes and mysterious passageways to prove it - and open a luxury boutique, featuring prints by Arbus and Araki, clothing by Thomas Wylde and Valentino, and a handbag collaboration pairing the Row with Damien Hirst. The store is Just One Eye, and those handbags are $55,000 apiece. Survey the local style crowd, and it quickly becomes evident that one of the city's primary selling points is precisely that it's not New York or Paris or London or Milan, or anywhere else where fashion really matters. "Sometimes it's nice to have a distance from New York," says Ross, a former LVMH and Prada executive and now a consultant to Balenciaga. "People are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go, go!" Whatever you're into," Chait says. People are just very experimental and supportive here. Which all sounds supercool. But is the L.A. fashion scene actually having a moment, one that could allow it to compete on the international stage? Local fashionistas are loath to employ the term, perhaps because they know that moments are fleeting - yielding, in short order, to other moments - or perhaps because the land of the endless summer, lunchtime Botox and near-mandatory yoga tends to put one in the mind-set not of moments but of eternities. But clearly something is happening. After years in which the city's style was typically represented by a starlet in terry cloth track pants and a matching hoodie clutching a Starbucks cup, Los Angeles is finally starting to be taken seriously as a design capital in its own right. Which might well be the worst thing that could happen. It's nearly magic hour after all, and Palm Springs is just an easy convertible ride away.