The film Permanent Residents combines extreme costume design with a documentary focus on everyday city life in contemporary Los Angeles. Compositionally stylish framing and a painterly texture of costumes and environments unfold for the viewer a fabricated space of collective imagination, which resonates with popular culture, myths and social fictions. The combination of futuristic looks on the part of the protagonists, and inane everyday activities such as cleaning, vacuuming and shopping, lend the film a radical humour with which the acceptance of given appearances and practices of everyday life are subversively undermined.