Much missed Salt Lake City fashion meister Jared Gold is planning a return to the Beehive capital. He says he's going to stage a try out run at Christmas for his 15 year retrospective which will launch in L.A. in March and, ---he adds, is going to be the largest runway show in America with 200 models.

I told Gold’s story in a City Weekly cover called Hot Couture. He’s just launched an internet store selling his favorite T-shirt designs dating back through his career, called Time Warp.

Gold left Salt Lake City in June 2008 to pursue a TV show with the reality division of Hearst. The concept was a train taking Gold and his crew round small town America putting on fashion shows. But the division closed and he’s now trying to develop it with another company. “I’m stuck in development hell,” he says.

While he waits for the TV show to happen – or not – he’s been doing consulting work, designing bridal material and costumes for WWE women wrestlers. Because Gold works on the edge of weirdness, he often finds himself in curious places. One was working on a wedding for a cult based on the 1970s TV show The Partridge Family.

He says he’s working for several companies on edgy Christmas material to flood major chain stores with for the holidays and also did a collection with artist Joshua Petker, whose work he describes as between “fashion illustration and a snuff film.”

After the years of struggle in Utah, it’s easier to make money in L.A. he says. People will ask him to make a hot air balloon children can ride or a gold sequined jock strap. He turns down work when he feels the client will take more interest in torturing him than the actual product.

He lives in a penthouse in downtown Hollywood, floor-to-ceiling windows providing views of the Hollywood hills. He goes out running in January, he says, yet yearns for Utah’s snow. “It’s kind of heartbreaking,” he says. But at least he's found inspiration in L.A., people,” he says, “who bend my mind a little bit.”