NANA: RETAIL FOR THE 80’s & 90’s UNDERGROUND

Long before online retail, before counterculture style became a trend cycle, there was NaNa — a small shop on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade that became one of the most important retailers in American subculture history.

NaNa was founded in 1976 by Nancy Kaufman, alongside close collaborators Paul Kaufman and Lynn Tyler. From the beginning, the store was built around shoes and boots — specifically the kinds of shoes and boots that nobody else in the U.S. would carry. NaNa was among the first to import Monkey Boots from Czechoslovakia. They sold Doc Martens before Doc Martens were everywhere. Creepers, skull-buckle boots, anything with the right combination of utility and edge — if it came out of a British or European subculture, NaNa got it on a plane and put it on Santa Monica.

That mix of careful sourcing and uncompromising point of view made NaNa more than a store. It became a cultural hub for whichever subculture was rising at the moment — punk in the late '70s and early '80s, post-punk and goth through the mid-'80s, grunge into the early '90s. Kids from Los Angeles and Orange County and farther came to NaNa specifically because what they were looking for didn't exist anywhere else. The store eventually expanded to multiple locations and shipped nationally, influencing how an entire generation of Americans dressed.

The link between NaNa and FACT. is direct. The Monkey Boot — the design FACT.'s MNKY Boot and MNKY Shoe are built from — was first introduced to American subculture audiences through NaNa's imports. The boot that started as Czechoslovak military issue in the 1930s made it to American Mods, Skinheads, Punks, and Goths in large part because Nancy Kaufman saw the silhouette and decided it belonged here. That lineage runs straight through FACT.'s footwear today.

NaNa eventually closed, as most cultural institutions of its kind do — outlasted by the internet, the malls, and the homogenization of the things it sold. But the role it played in shaping how American underground culture looked, and how it shopped, is impossible to overstate. The store wasn't just a place to buy boots. It was a place to encounter the rest of the world, in the form of footwear and t-shirts and one-off finds, at a time before any of it was a click away.

This is for NaNa.