You’re standing in front of one of those Doolan-Larson storefronts now. 1510 Haight was Mnasidika, a clothing shop opened in April 1965 by a young woman from Louisiana named Peggy Caserta. She named the shop after a character in the poetry of Pierre Louys. She sold sandals, blouses, and dresses to the small but growing post-Beat hippie scene.
Caserta’s mother was a seamstress. Together they invented the modern bell-bottom jean by taking off-the-rack Levi’s and inserting triangular fabric gussets at the seams below the knee. Mnasidika sold them faster than they could be made. By 1966 every band on the Haight was wearing them. By 1967 they were the international uniform of the counterculture. The Levi’s company, watching the demand, started making their own bell-bottoms. Caserta did not get rich off the design.
Mnasidika operated from April 1965 to 1968. Janis Joplin was a customer, a friend, and (according to Caserta’s later memoir) a lover. The shop is gone. The storefront is now something else. The fact that bell-bottoms were invented in the Doolan-Larson building, one wall away from the Psychedelic Shop, is the kind of detail that captures how compressed the Haight’s history is.