salavador-camarena

Special Delivery

For Salvador Camarena, 
wrapping a gift is a work of art.

Ellen Alperstein Arts & Entertainment

salavador-camarena
Salvador Camarena is up, up, and away with his beautiful balloons.
PHOTOS BY MISHA GRAVENOR

111 East

CAMEO

As a kid, Salvador Camarena would sit on the toilet lid in his Indio home while his mother primped in the bathroom mirror before a night on the town with his father. The young boy liked to watch her construct a look that was singularly hers, choosing an outfit, applying her makeup, styling her hair. He studied how she wrapped herself into a fabulous package that everyone would notice.

He was a good student. Today, Camarena is a professional stylist responsible for creating signature looks for magazine fashion shoots, red carpet appearances, and the interior design of the newly purchased Alexander-style home in north Palm Springs he shares with his partner, Ross Mathews.

In short, Camarena’s job is to decorate things — people, products, studio sets, walls — and he’s been doing it since his mom-watching days. He recalls playing with his My Buddy doll. “I cut his hair,” he says, smiling at the memory. Then he replaced Buddy’s standard-issue overalls with a way-cooler baseball uniform accessorized by lipstick.

As the youngest of four boys, Camarena was the arty one who realized early on that packaging could be as interesting as the thing it covered. After he got too old to redesign Buddy, he did that favor for his brother, an auto mechanic. “I bought him a suit and gave him a makeover. He loved it,” Camarena says. “I’m still dressing people, but they’re not dolls now.”

The evolution from avocation to vocation was moved along when Camarena got hooked watching Sex and the City. It was then, he says, that he learned “how styling was a character in the show. It made me wonder, ‘Who does this job?’”

Now, he does. And whether it’s on set or off, he says, “It’s all about the fun.” Whether he’s positioning a black lacquer cow teeteringly close to the edge of a Hollywood hotel roof for a magazine fashion shoot or conceiving the cover of a book about dating with its author styled half-Lolita/half Audrey Hepburn, Camarena follows the rule of designer Marc Jacobs: “Make it pretty, but fuck it up.”

Designing things, says the guy whose smile probably was apparent as he emerged from the birth canal, “is not that serious.”

As an art student at College of the Desert, Camarena was more a doer than a reader. He liked making stuff, but wasn’t engaged by his art history courses. Now, as a (nearly) fully formed adult, he appreciates how the knowledge he has acquired informs the world around him. Knowing something about Mondrian, he says, enables him to appreciate how the textured glass he sees in so many local buildings invokes the geometric aesthetic of the great Dutch abstract painter. His education, he claims, helped refine his visual vocabulary, helped him recognize things like how the cover of the erstatz vintage record player he got for Mathews replicates the vintage palm leaf design of the wallpaper at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Salvador Camarena wrapped this Big Apple-themed box with old copies of the New York Post; the colorful present is paper from a 99 Cents Only store fringed to resemble a piñata; and the elegant striped gift is an ode to the Hollywood Regency style of the old Beverly Hills Hotel.

He appreciates how his past seeps into his present. “I didn’t know how being a desert native influenced my sense of design until I moved away [to L.A.],” he says, naming bursts of bright color as regularly featured players in his creations.

Sure, bougainvillea is a tarty little star among the cast of brown desert flora, but you can’t help wondering if Camarena’s palette isn’t as much about where he grew up as it is all about Mama. “[She] always used to say, ‘Never leave the house without lipstick.’ ” He pauses, another smile sliding across his open face. “My mother is so glamorous. She’s the most glamorous person I know.”

Glamorous and, by all evidence, a good parent. She raised a generous man. When Camarena presents a gift, his point is “to put a smile on your face … to create something with a wink and a nod.” Sometimes his generosity happens on a whim, like the time he saw a Mexican tapestry in a thrift shop, dolled it up with some brightly colored pom-pom-y things, and presented it to a friend as a wall-hanging housewarming gift. For Mathews’ birthday, Camarena stuffed a plain backpack with travel items including minibottles of wine and hotel shampoo and things to read on a plane. He presented it to Mathews with a card that read, “Pack a bag. The car’s picking us up. I’ll give you the tickets to where we’re going when we get to the airport.”

That destination was San Francisco, a trip Mathews says he loved: “I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”

This holiday season, we asked Camarena to wrap some gifts in a way only he could devise. He never gives people he knows the same gift (where’s the whimsy in that?), but for our fake purposes, he chose four of the same size box to dress up in different styles to be fake-given to four people who either live in or love certain places that resonate for him. Although the pictured boxes are empty, if you received a gift decked out like one of these, would you even want to open it?

This Palm Springs gift is a mix of real foliage (palm leaf and bougainvillea) and fake (succulent and air plant). Camerena gilded a plastic flamiago, and the orange paper references the front door of the Parker Hotel.