Published by Damiani in 2025, Jasmine Benjamin’s City of Angels: A Book about L.A. Style assembles more than 120 portraits made across Los Angeles. The 160-page hardcover considers style not simply as clothing, but as a public language shaped by neighborhood, music, art, work and self-invention. Celebrities appear alongside local figures and everyday residents, placing recognition and anonymity within the same account of the city.
Benjamin is both a photographer and costume designer. Raised in Northern California and based in Hollywood, she brings a stylist’s attention to how identities are constructed while remaining alert to the particular social worlds in which they appear. Her subjects encompass streetwear makers, Topanga Canyon free spirits, Venice surf and skate communities, Melrose shop workers, Chicano punks, Korean Town fashion enthusiasts, LGBTQIA+ designers, Laurel Canyon bohemians, and Black musicians and artists from South Central, Inglewood, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park. The range is central to the book’s argument: there is no single Los Angeles look, only a shifting field of affiliations and contrasts.
Geography is more than backdrop here. Approximately 80 percent of those photographed are native Angelenos or come from greater California, giving the project a substantially local point of view. An illustrated map by Los Angeles artist Isaac Escoto, known as Sickid, extends that emphasis, linking portraiture to the dispersed structure of the metropolis. Glamour and rawness, polish and informality are allowed to coexist rather than being resolved into a uniform image.
For collectors of fashion, street culture and contemporary portraiture, the book deserves attention as a concentrated record of how one city’s style is produced collectively. Its significance lies in the breadth of Benjamin’s social field, the prominence given to locally rooted subjects, and the collaboration with Escoto. Together, these elements make the volume a useful study of Los Angeles identity expressed through people, dress and place.
