I met Santino Rice a few years ago at a Rufus Wainwright concert at the Hollywood Bowl. He has a warm smile and contagious laugh. Santino always has amazingly fun stories to tell. (And yes, an occasional Tim Gunn impression.)

Since that night Santino has been nice enough to give LAist the inside track on all things Project Runway. We planned a premiere party (Watching Project Runway’s Premiere with Santino Rice) and finale party the season that Christian Siriano took the top honors. These days Santino is designing beautiful clothes and also spending time judging the contestants on the set of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

When I told Santino that I wanted to write about Japanese design in LA, we decided to head to Little Tokyo and spend a day in one of our favorite neighborhoods. Photographer Tom Andrews came with us to document our shopping trip.

We walked through the Tokyo Village Plaza to 2nd street and headed to Rafu Bussan, a giant store filled with amazing traditional dolls, pottery, and textiles.

Santino loves the patterns on the textiles, especially the graphic ones.

We talked about what makes the more rough and natural pottery so appealing.

These flower frog remind Santino of a tool used for felting fabric.

CLICK HERE of the rest of Santino’s shopping post (and video!) after the jump!

The costumes on these dolls have amazing detail.

Then we headed to a bookstore. Santino loves to check out Japanese magazines. He showed me how some magazines are almost like catalogues. One magazine had photos of almost every Louis Vuitton bag ever made.

In the supermarket.

We stopped in a store that sells kimonos.

And we walked over to the Koyasan Buddhist Temple

The roof garden of the Kyoto Grand Hotel

YouTube – Shopping in Little Tokyo (Los Angeles) With Santino Rice

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