Cobbler of Hollywood

The wrinkled hands of 88-year-old Arturo Azinian, owner of Arturo’s Shoe Fixx on Santa Monica Boulevard where celebrities and everyone else with shoe issues go for help. Photo: Reuters/Mario Anzouni

Arturo Azinian plucks a pair of Chanel pumps from a box full of shoes, unfazed by the leather peeling off the interlocking Cs on the toes or the tarnished metallic heels.

“These have a lot of miles on them, but they will be like new, for about US$70 (RM262),” says Azinian, an 88-year-old Beverly Hills cobbler famous for saving the fancy footwear of the elite in the ritzy 90210 zip code.

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Leather Clothing Designer

Chelsey Hall still has the denim dress she designed when she was 11.

 

Hall keeps the dress, with its American flags, schoolhouses and watermelon slices, among the leather outfits in a closet in her studio.

 

If the denim dress, a 4-H project that won her a grand champion title, looks like it belongs on a farmer’s daughter on her way to a barn dance, the rest of the closet would be more comfortable on a biker chick on her way to Sturgis.

 

The dress, in other words, seems out of place. Just like Chelsey.

 

It would be easy, too easy, to look at Chelsey’s raven hair, long eyelashes and her leather pants, pants she designed, and then pass by her father’s Greeley Stampede regalia, and pigeonhole her and her parents, Dianna and Bill Hall.

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