Bryan Escareño: The Story of a Renaissance Man

Chicano fashion designer Bryan Escareño takes us back to the 90s con amor. His fashion label, Amor Prohibido, embodies that LA nostalgia the way he grew up back in Venice.

“Paris is influenced by New York. New York is influenced by LA. So, by default, LA is influencing Paris. And who’s influencing LA?” Escareño says on the latest episode of Storytellers.

We caught up with Bryan in his downtown LA atelier, where galleries of framed art line one wall, where collections of baggy pants fill clothing racks on another. In the soft morning light, shining into the oversized arched window on the furthest wall, Bryan is busily preparing for fashion week in Paris.

Here, in the den of a renaissance man, surrounded by artistic inspiration of many mediums, Bryan creates. He thinks, he plans, he makes.

As our LatiNation documentary crew files into the atelier, Bryan organizes fabrics by the sewing machine. He greets us and tidies up the sitting area by the window. He throws on a denim green jacket from his upcoming fall collection.

Eventually, he joins me and Pedro, the cinematographer, on the couch, where we chat briefly about art, fashion, and the creation of culture. The producing unit leans in, the camera rolls, and the official interview begins.

As a fashion designer and the creative director of Amor Prohibido, Escareño tells stories of his past, of his culture, and re-imagines the global beat of style from a true Angelean point of reference. His brand is street style and high fashion wrapped up in a singular vision, collection by collection.

Let’s go back. Being an artistic kid was never really an option for him. Growing up with parents from Michoacán in Venice (before Venice was the Venice we know today), it was either sports or school. That message was re-iterated when the whole family got together, too.

“We’d always meet up Sundays, drinking and boxing while cooking, and they’d put me and my little cousin versus each other,” Escareño remembers. “Now, thinking about us being at a barbeque and having little kids fight, it’s kind of crazy, but that’s just normal Mexican things growing up in LA.”

That memory comes alive in Bryan’s mind.

“I have pictures of that barbeque that I look back at,” he continues. “Now I catch myself looking at everybody’s outfits.”

He may not have known it at the time, but he was already sowing the seeds of inspiration as an artist. But finding his own space in fashion wasn’t easy, and overcoming his father’s machismo was part of that journey.

Sewing, making clothes, designing clothes: his father didn’t approve of it. He let it be known when Bryan asked for a sewing machine at Christmas one year.

“I think we all grow up, as Mexican men, as Latino men, with that pressure to, like, get approval from your father. Like, just, I’m proud of you or good job,” Escareño says, “but I think it’s a funny counterintuitive thing where it finally happens when you say fuck it.”

He bought a sewing machine anyway and started to mess around with it. One day, he saw a shirt he wanted to buy, but it was expensive, so he decided to make it himself. Then he made another. And another.

“After a few months, I got a little more confident and I wore one of the shirts that I made. That day, a lot of my coworkers and a few customers were like, ‘yo, nice shirt.’ That gave me the confidence [to wear] another one of the shirts, and at that point, my coworkers were like, ‘yo, where are you getting these flannels, what are these?’ And then I told them: I made it,” Escareño says. “Everything changes when you tell somebody you made it.”

Escareño, around this time, felt like everything he loved was prohibited. Sewing, for his father, wasn’t quite what he envisioned for his son. His girlfriend at the time, a lighter-skinned girl, wasn’t exactly what society accepted for someone with his look.

But, like all good art, from that pain Amor Prohibido was born—and the brand’s name is a tribute to his own story.

Bryan’s full interview can be watched on Storytellers. Don’t skip it.