Tom Sachs: "31 Rue Cambon" The Chanel fakes people are lining up to see
By Maxine Arnheiter
“How do you tell the story of sequins?” asked artist Tom Sachs last Monday night during a talk in his SoHo studio. Guests crowded into the narrow space, gingerly sidestepping power tools and woodshop paraphernalia to hear the artist discuss his latest project, “31 Rue Cambon.” Named after Chanel’s historic Paris flagship, it is a slightly madcap recreation of that boutique, complete with thirty-one flattened replicas of the brand’s tweed suits, made from painted plywood. It opened during New York Fashion Week with a line down the block, rivaling the one at the real Chanel store.
With his question, Sachs directed his audience’s attention to the many squares of plywood hanging on the wall, painted and texturized to look like fabric samples. On three of them, black paint, applied in a thick layer, had been combed through to create texture while, instead of sequins, Sachs and his team found that shards of broken glass added a comparable level of shimmer. From a small distance, the trompe l’oeil tweeds are a convincing imposter for the real thing.
Next to Sachs sat his close friend, the photographer Mario Sorrenti, who had shot Sachs’s Chanel replicas for prototype, a fashion and culture publication launched earlier this month by creative director Alastair McKimm. Sorrenti’s images honor not only the finished product of “31 Rue Cambon,” but the painstaking efforts from Sachs’s studio to recreate the idea of luxury. Take one close-up shot of a red tweed suit—shown clearly are the individual marks in thick black paint that create the illusion of textured fabric. In Sachs and Sorrenti’s world, tweed is plywood, and leather is cardboard.
“I wanted the experience to be like, ‘I can touch these. I can taste every piece of cardboard,’” said Sachs during the talk. According to Sachs, “31 Rue Cambon” is a show about envy and desire. “The desire for acquisition is sublimated into the love of making,” he explained, or put more simply, “I wanted it, so I made it, and then I didn’t want it anymore.” The show is as much a love letter to Chanel as it is a satirization of it.
