GOLD RUSH

I’d always loved the original Commes des Garcons (CdG) boutique in Chelsea, designed by Future Systems, from 1998. It was tucked on a quiet block of far west 22nd Street, and identified only by a little battered steel sign from the previous tenant, that read, alluringly “Heavenly Body Works." One entered through a curved aluminum tube with a giant glass door inside. That door had a huge kidney-shaped hole in the middle that one reached through to open it. A sloped aluminum ramp carried one down to the sales floor, where the artsy, pricey dresses and suits were displayed in an array of shining white cabinets that tilted this way and that, like icebergs. The architecture had a novel quality; each time I visited I felt I was discovering it once again. So when CdG closed for a remodel last year it felt like a big mistake.

CdG kept a good portion of the old store intact. The entrance sign, tunnel, door and ramp are still there, and still delightful. The new interior is similar to the original, with chunky freestanding cabinets. But they’re gold. It’s a finish that’s less garish, and less opulent, than it sounds: an aluminum veneer with a dull, mottled surface, like the inside of a tomato can. The new cases have the same eccentric, canted geometries as the old ones, but they’ve been constructed more crudely (which is, most likely, unintentional). The edges of the gold panels don’t meet neatly, exposing strips of bare construction board behind. The fluorescent lights inside them are plainly visible, and there are stray pencil marks where installers noted joints and measurements. The store’s original bare concrete floor remains, but is scarred at those points where the old cabinets had been screwed down, which have been roughly patched with epoxy and painted.

The informal spirit of the remodel breathes new life into the store. The old white cabinets had a bright, super-modern sheen. The new gold ones are gentler, earthier, and kookier. Their raw construction and dull glow warm the room. The clothing being peddled here has been conceived with architectural precision and pretension, but the store has not.

Image courtesy of Comme des Garcons.

November 01, 2014 by Nalina Moses

Punk: Chaos to Couture is smaller sized and scaled than previous Met Costume Institute exhibits like Anglomania and Savage Beauty, and also less richly contextualized than those shows, which positioned punk as an eruption of eccentric personal vision through the elaborate stratifications of British culture. Instead Chaos to Couture shows us exactly what it promises, how fashion rises in the street and works its way onto the runways. The first gallery holds racks of t-shirts and trousers from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary 1970’s London boutique Sex, all obliterated (“deconstructed” is too gentle a word) with rips, cuts, safety pins, and comically tasteless sexual and anti-royalist graphics. The following galleries show proper fashion, including a tweed Chanel suit embellished with hand-trimmed holes, a Versace gown whose whiplash panels are held together by over-sized gold safety pins, and a sagging, striped, open-weave, knit dress from Rodarte. The “chaos” to “couture” comparison doesn’t serve the couture well. Next to the real things – unwashed, ill-fitting, falling-to-threads, off-the-rack clothing – the legitimate fashions feel lifeless.

Part of this might be the displays, which show all the clothes on the Met’s standard, white, Cristy-Turlington-faced mannequins, in ladylike poses lifted high on platforms. One of the galleries is decorated to resemble the bowels of a Lower East Side club, with simulated cracked cement block walls painted matte black. Why didn’t the curators blow holes through the walls? Or dismember the mannequins? Or pump stale cigarette smoke through the rooms? Another part of it is curatorial. Most of high fashions have been selected for punk motifs rather than aesthetic kinship. Of the "couture" on display, only the Junya Watanabe and Commes des Garcons garments feel authentically punk, undoing the body’s natural graces with monstrous appendages and asymmetries that are just as arresting and convulsive as multiple piercings, black-and-white face makeup, gravity-defying hairdos, and all-over tattoos. The trio of black Alexander McQueen dresses on display, tailored, exquisitely, from synthetics that emulate bubble wrap and garbage bags, are not punk; they are classical in their proportions and repose. Why didn’t the Met include dresses from McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, which obscured the face with feathers and veils while uncovering the stomach, breast and thigh, giving the women wearing them a disfiguring, disquieting power? It’s this unease that’s deeply punk.

May 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses