Tom Sachs: “31 Rue Cambon” House Style
By Sahir Ahmed
When I visit Tom Sachs at his longtime downtown New York studio, it is only beginning its transformation: Outside, white awnings will soon bear Chanel’s familiar black logo, while beneath them, metal gates will have the house’s interlocking “C”s welded into place. Inside, a funhouse-like corridor of mirrors opens onto a room lined with rows of tweed skirt suits, handbags, shoes, and jewelry display cases, already giving the place the uncanny polish of luxury retail, though almost nothing is made from what it appears to be.
By Sept. 11, the SoHo studio will reopen as “31 Rue Cambon,” Sachs’ unofficial, handmade version of Chanel’s legendary Paris address, populated by sets cut from plywood, jewelry assembled from L.E.G.O. pieces, and retail fixtures reconstructed in cardboard. Even the chandelier hanging above the entryway—modeled after the crystal chandelier in Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s apartment—is made from recycled bicycle reflectors.
In spite of the logomania, Sachs insists “31 Rue Cambon” is not actually about the fashion house. For the 60-year-old artist, the project is simply the latest fixation in a practice that has previously produced Nutsy’s, 2001–03, a sprawling installation that juxtaposed McDonald’s with Le Corbusier’s modernism, and the ongoing “Space Program” series, begun in 2007, through which Sachs has staged N.A.S.A. missions in his own handmade materials. Fashion retail, however, isn’t entirely new territory.
To Sachs, Chanel is “the ultimate of its kind,” an absurd concentration of craftsmanship, mythology, celebrity, class, marketing, and desire. He describes his own relationship to objects through a personal interpretation of Plato’s cave: an apartment filled with everything he wants but cannot have, Chanel suits among them. “I’m not the kind of guy that can wear one,” he says of the skirt suits. So he did what he often does with objects he covets and made his own version, choosing plywood, a material that felt more authentic to him.
