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

REFFRESHED

There was a kerfuffle last year when Canadian fashion retailer Joe Fresh took the Manufacturers Hanover Trust building as its New York City flagship. The trim, five-story glass box on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, completed in 1954 by SOM, is a beloved modern icon. It’s two street-facing sides are dressed in glass panels that drop straight down to the sidewalk, without any frame below. This stunning skin exposes, at day and night, every corner of the building’s glowing, open insides. The interior and exterior are both landmarked, and thus protected from substantial alteration. Nontheless architecture historians, preservationists, and enthusiasts wondered what the brand was up to.

There was no need to worry. The shop, designed by Burdifilek, heightens the building’s original transparency. It leaves the exterior glass skin untouched, so that both ground and second floors remain radically open to the outside. Rather than perimeter cabinets, the clothing is set out on clusters of low white tables and shelves – moveable islands of merchandise. And two key original ornamental features on the second floor, an immense cloud-like wire sculpture hovering from the ceiling in front, and a seventy-foot-long freestanding screen in back, both by Harry Bertoia, have been restored and reinstated. In the bright wide-open interior these pieces, shaped from a hammered, burnished, gold metal, are magnificent grace notes.

The result is a shopping experience that’s a complete bliss-out. Stepping off the escalator onto the second floor is like arriving in mid-century modern heaven. Unlike other stores, that conceal windows and pack floors densely with product to keep shoppers focused on shopping, Joe Fresh keeps things clear. The audacious stretches of free space (along the perimeter glass walls, below the high ceilings, between the merchandise displays) is deeply luxurious. Shopping there, on a polished white marble floor beneath glowing ceiling tiles, one feels suspended from the city and its rhythms. Fifth Avenue appears, through the windows, as a hazy dream below. It’s a celestial experience of modernism and midtown.

Photograph courtesy of SOM.

October 30, 2014 by Nalina Moses

BELOW AVERAGE

Two years ago Gap brought in Creative Director Rebekkah Bay to steer the brand, and then, suddenly, there were streaks of life inside the stores: capri pants cut from floral prints, denim shirts trimmed with pixellated borders, and shift dresses cut with an assertive minimalism, all in a palette of chalky pastels. While these pieces could shape a compelling story about understated modern dress, Gap is trumpeting their anonymity. Their Fall 2014 print ads feature actors modeling the most current clothes with the tagline “Dress Normal." It’s a campaign that’s been disastrous financially. No wonder. It breaks cardinal rules of American life and of fashion: that each one of us is special, and that what each one of us wears declares who we are.

The company’s PR positioned the campaign, bizarrely, as a call to individuality, but others see it as a stab at normcore. When delivered properly, by brands like Band of Outsider, normcore takes anonymous middle class clothes (button-downs, khakis, sweatshirts, cardigans) and reconceives them ironically (with tighter fits, higher hems, bolder prints), illustrating that the wearer has a heightened sensitivity to such matters. Slight eccentricities in style are amplified by knowingness. In comparison, the "Dress Normal” ads promote banality.

But the models, including off-center beauties Zosia Mamet and Anjelica Houston, are appealing, and the copy could have been tweaked to frame the images more richly. One shot shows Michael K. WiIlliams standing beside a fern-green Pontiac GTO, while a commerical plane takes off in the middle distance. The actor sports a greying beard, wears a wool baseball jacket over a white turtleneck, and twists purposefully away from the camera. He’s an unusually sober, enigmatic mannequin. He could be a contemporary anti-hero, taking pains to remain unobserved while waiting for an accomplice, an enemy, or a lover. Instead the ad presents him as an icon of conformity.

Image courtesy of Gap.

October 27, 2014 by Nalina Moses

AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney is splendid art world spectacle. The lines are long, the crowds are lively, and the artist’s sculptures and paintings, particularly the monumentally-scaled works on the higher floors, spring to life inside the museum’s cavernous white-walled, stone-floored galleries.

The art varies tremendously in terms of materials, but it’s all of a piece: bright, synthetic, energetic, and relentlessly positive. Rather than beauty or pleasure, it goes after happiness. In his work from the 80’s Koon was focused, more intellectually, on consumer culture and advertising, and their promises of satisfaction. In later work, to get at the same, he crafts his own iconography of happiness. He shows us candy, toys, cartoon figures, pop culture heroes, romantic love and (very literally) sex. Embedded in all of this is a notion – sweet, uncomplicated, contemporary, and profoundly American – of what happiness is.

The most powerful pieces are from the 1994 Celebration series, massive sculptures and paintings based on popular imagery. The series includes the iconic sculpture Yellow Dog, a 10-foot high yellow stainless steel rendition of the kind of balloon animal distributed at childrens’ birthday parties. (It’s an elegant piece, and the most popular spot in the exhibit for selfies.) Also on display, from the same series, is a monumental, multi-colored aluminum sculpture of a pile of Play Dough, and paintings of toys: action figurines, plastic horses, stuffed animals, and building blocks.

My favorite painting shows of slice of birthday cake wrapped in pink mylar. It’s gigantic, about the size of a double door, and rendered in vivid, baroque perspective, as if it’s about to be shoved into the viewer’s mouth, in a palette of bracingly artificial colors. The cake is no longer food – a form of nourishment – but a symbol of bliss. The painting is set in a futuristic, hyper-real style, yet remains a literal, innocent image. There are no hidden depths here, no irony and no commentary. The dazzle is, for Koons, what happiness is all about.

Image courtesy of Jeff Koons. Jeff Koons. Cake, 1995–97. Oil on canvas; 125 3⁄8 x 116 3⁄8 in. (318.5 × 295.6 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons.

October 18, 2014 by Nalina Moses