Los Angeles waves a saw-toothed flag, green, yellow, red, like a strip of film reassembled by hand. A city that lives between the shadow of the studios and the light of the desert.
The design, created in 1931, is bold: three zigzag bands evoke the mountains surrounding the city, but also the electric energy that powers it, the perpetual motion of its freeways. At the center, the municipal seal: a Mexican eagle, four stars, oranges, a grizzly bear, the ocean.
Green represents the olive trees, yellow the gold and the sun, red... perhaps blood, perhaps the legendary sunsets of the Pacific coast.
It is an eccentric, almost psychedelic flag that perfectly reflects a city made of contradictions: beaches and deserts, wealth and poverty, dreams and disillusionment. Los Angeles does nothing halfway, not even its flag.