Jennifer Smith was halfway through high school when she visited California with her parents and decided to stay. A decade later, she conceived and launched C Magazine, a must-read publication that highlights the people and places that make California the Golden State. Then came the 2025 wildfires, destroying her Malibu home and those of many friends in her C community. Did that dim the lights on the California Dream? Not for Smith.

“After a couple of tears, I was ready to rebuild,” she tells Lyn Winter, host of Rodeo Drive The Podcast, adding, “when you wake up every morning with that ocean outside as your backyard, and you hear the waves crashing, and at night you see the glistening moon over the waves and the sea, it's just so magical that you'll just do anything to keep having it.”

Now Smith celebrates 20 years of C Magazine with the publication of a book of stories drawn from past articles: California: Dream State: Stylish Living from Canyon to Coast (Rizzoli, Fall 2025).

Winter spoke with Smith about the deep allure and mythology of the West Coast, the evolution of fashion, art and culture over the last two decades, and about making a successful print magazine in the digital age. For Smith, it started with landing her first cover, featuring model Carolyn Murphy, thanks to a chance meeting over at a sushi counter in Malibu.

“We just started talking, and I said, ‘I'm launching a magazine about California. Would you ever consider being on the cover?’ And she said, ‘of course I would.’ And then we had Kirsty Hume as our second cover, because she knew Carolyn did it. And then all of a sudden, I got Cindy Crawford, and then I got Claire Danes, and then it just, from there we kept going and going.”

Smith explains that the key to success in publishing today is being more than a magazine. The C-team curates events together with advertising partners, many on Rodeo Drive, like the memorable dinner for 25 at Harry Winston, at which guests on the street of dreams were each presented with a silver domed dessert, recalls Smith.

“And inside the silver dome was actually a piece of jewelry for each of the guests. So everyone was just expecting to see some piece of cake, and there was some million dollar bauble, and they all got to wear it. So they were dripping in jewels and eating their dessert, and we had the best time.”

As much as she loves the city, Smith feels the call to the wild. The book contains sumptuous photos of lives lived well in the canyons, the coast, mountains and desert. The only challenge was picking from more than 200 issues of the magazine. She and her team looked for timeless stories “that stood out to us and that we would want to celebrate and see again and again.”

Stories that made the cut include a feature on Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glaser in their weekend home “that was just so cool with this mountain, rocky, jagged, beautiful;” and the hat maker Nick Fouquet, in his “amazing house in Topanga that is very cool and architectural.”

The current issue of C Magazine, compiled just after the recent fires, was designed as a love letter to California. ”I'm forever, endlessly in love with it,” she concludes.

Season 5 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 5 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kay Monica Rose

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso

@rodeodrive

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Rodeo Drive has gone wild. Visitors to the luxury street have fallen in love with eight colorful, life-size sculptures of animals – Wild Kong, Standing Bear, Panda and Crocodile – designed by the French artist Richard Orlinski, and part of this summer's “Rodeo Drive Celebrates Fashion”.

But sculptures are only part of Orlinski’s multifaceted output. He was the artist of record at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, he mixes up art with music and stand up comedy, and he has partnerships with international brands including Lancome, Hublot, Puma, and Disney. Now he has written a book – Pourquoi J'ai Cassé les Codes, or “Why I Broke The Codes” – about his life of going against the grain.

He stopped off recently in Beverly Hills, and talked with Lyn Winter, host of Rodeo Drive - The Podcast, about his unconventional approach to art and life, starting with why he chose to celebrate wild animals in his sculpture.

Animals, he says, have much to teach humans, as they “obey a virtuous circle,” and kill only for food, while humans kill for nothing. He spoke about his personal experience with a violent father, which also laid the ground for his future self: “I realized very early that I have nobody to trust, so I was very alone. And when you like that, you're angry, and you want to succeed.”

He says that his fighting spirit helped him deal with initial rejection from the Parisian art world, and develop his mass appeal with a sense of freedom to do his own thing. “I'm not like a niche artist,” he says. “I'm popular, but popular in a good way. I create an emotion, even a bad emotion, but it is emotion.”

Orlinski explains his admiration for Andy Warhol, why he opened his own chain of Orlinski galleries, and how he treats art more like fashion - with seasons, and a branded experience that is meant to be fun for people of all ages. The future of art display, he says, is big spaces, where visitors can eat, spend time, and enjoy a multisensory experience. “The competition is always the same. So you have to create, invent something new, and I think the artist and the galleries and the people in this industry need to create something like that.”

He also talks about his book, Pourquoi J'ai Cassé les Codes, which has been a hit with the French public. It’s a self-help guide of sorts, delivering life lessons from his own experiences. “Many people are very thankful about this book, because it helps them to change, to listen to the little voice inside, to follow their dreams.”

While seven of Orlinski’s wild creatures will leave Rodeo Drive, one work will remain permanently on view. Which one might that be, asked Winter.

“I think it's the Kong with a big heart, and written on the heart is ‘Rodeo Drive’, responds Orlinski. “It fits with the place, and it was made for it. This is the only piece that was really made for it.”

Season 5 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 5 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kay Monica Rose

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit the website: https://rodeodrive-bh.com/podcast/

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For over 100 years Women’s Wear Daily has been the bible for the fashion industry, and its archives include numerous hidden contributions of Black designers and models. Now that history has been gathered in a stunning new book, BLACK IN FASHION, by Tonya Blazio-Licorish and Tara Donaldson, showcasing the indelible influence of Black culture on a global scale.

On Episode 5 of Rodeo Drive-The Podcast, host Lyn Winter spoke with the authors about the book and the revelations they found in the WWD archives.

“Fashion has a flawed public history because it hasn't included all the voices,” says Blazio-Licorish, also a visual culture historian and editor with PMC Media Archives. “We were always there, and not just there in marginal roles, but in important roles, in roles that were shaping fashion,” adds Donaldson, most recently WWD's executive editor and Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Fairchild Media.

Dating back as early as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black community was making its mark on clothing and style, from Black dolls for young Black children, early fashion shows, business associations, and fashionable scenes like at The Cotton Club.

The authors single out early “influencers” such as Josephine Baker, who even had a hosiery color named in her honor, the dancer Katherine Dunham, who was all the rage in 1940s France, and then the Black models, including Pat Cleveland and Bethann Hardison, who shook up global fashion at the famed 1973 Battle of Versailles.

The late André Leon Talley recalled this momentous event in conversation with the authors before his passing. “You could almost just reach out and touch the energy they gave in the air. It was like quiet thunder, and because everyone saw that and felt that at the battle, French designers – Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent – they started wanting black models.”

Black fashion has been intertwined with politics – and BLACK IN FASHION explores how clothing reflected the moment:

“During civil rights, that time was really about respectability politics,” explains Donaldson. “It was coming in your Sunday best, to assert dignity. It was a kind of a polite request for human rights. By the time you get to the 70s, the mood changes, the look changes…then the Black Panther movement, it's more powerful, it's more assertive…You have the leather jackets, you have the turtlenecks, you have the berets. And then we see that evolve even into the 2020s. And there's the branded T-shirts, Black Lives Matter.”

Finally, the story is still unfolding. Black designers are still not getting the high level industry jobs they deserve, argue Blazio-Licorish and Donaldson, and are even ambivalent about being labeled as Black.

So Blazio-Licorish says they finished on a question: “We purposefully left the conversation open to, who's next, who's now, and what do they have to say about where fashion is going to go?”

Season 5 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 5 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kay Monica Rose

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso.

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.