Tom Sachs Channels Chanel

By Rachel Syme

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On a recent sweltering morning, Sachs, now sixty, stood outside his sprawling SoHo studio, on Centre Street—where he has been making art for the past forty years—thinking, yet again, about a window display. For his latest work, “31 Rue Cambon,” an immersive installation that opens to the public on September 11th, during New York Fashion Week, Sachs converted part of his studio into an uncanny simulacrum of the luxury fashion house Chanel’s flagship boutique, in Paris. Viewers will enter directly from the street, where Sachs and his team of around twenty people were in the process of re-creating the iconic Chanel storefront, with cream-colored awnings made of cardboard and wrought-iron gates emblazoned with the brand’s interlocking “C”s. Inside, viewers will find a mirrored entrance hall and a showroom stocked with handbags, shoes, sparkly baubles, and Chanel’s signature two-piece suits—all painstakingly handcrafted out of everyday materials such as cardboard, paper, plywood, and broken glass. Sachs, who has the garrulous, jittery mien of a hyperactive teen-ager, explained that he intended to conceal the exterior till the last possible minute. “We’re keeping butcher paper up on the windows until we open,” he said. “I think shock and awe is best.”