The rumba girls do the Santa Monica Flea

While the Santa Monica Flea Market doesn’t always have the most outstanding finds, it’s truly bountiful in its offering of fascinating characters like Lui Antal Deak (showing an abstract oil painting below), a loquacious, lovely Frenchman who deals in fine art and who also happens to be a nudist, which is, we suppose, unrelated. This early Sunday morning, he informed us he’s met perfect ten “bleached out” supermodels, their passion and sensuality gone cold. “It isn’t about what kind of car you have, it’s about how you drive your vehicle,” he euphemistically and sagely stated.


From there, we moved onto Dalia Litvak’s booth to check out her inimitable jewelry. She began producing her creations a decade ago, when her collection of jewels, pearls, and chains, dating from the Victorian to the modern Italian and everywhere in between, began evolving into one-of-a-kind pieces, merging old and new in innovative, unexpected ways. We then dropped by our friend Cecilio’s booth (pictured below with one of a pair of 1930s ceramic lamps he’d sold just seconds before). Cecilio is a regular Santa Monica flea vendor and his shop on La Brea, Things Antiques, is a secret hotspot for stellar vintage finds. And you can head right next door after shopping with Cecilio for a Pink’s dog.


This particular Sunday was good for vintage clothing scouting and we were hunting for some tailored vintage dresses (with no success, unfortunately). Rococo Vintage (vintage clothing for tyrannical aesthetes) gave us a super tip concerning vintage clothing, which confounds most women in terms of sizing: take the waist of any vintage (or unsized) dress to your neck and wrap it around – if it reaches all the way around and overlaps a bit, it’s likely to fit your waist. Incredibly helpful for future vintage clothing shopping! Thanks, Rebecca Darling.



At Cindy Ciskowski’s booth, we nabbed a collection of new linen drumshades and a pair of graphic yellow and white pillows (shown off by Cindy herself in the photo) as we’re truly nuts about the color yellow right now. We also fell in love with a single pillow in a beautiful, subtly tea-stained, antiqued pattern. This trend is huge right now in New York. ABC Carpet is loving it in a major way. And so are we. Expect more of this in the months to come for textiles across the board – rugs, pillows, windows, upholstery, and more.








Go to the Santa Monica Flea Market and experience it for yourself! It’s on the first and fourth Sunday of every month and if the antique art, furniture, lamps, and jewelry don’t charm you, we’re willing to bet the people will.