Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

In New York’s Chinatown, Tom Sachs Has Recreated Chanel’s Paris Flagship Out of Plywood and Paint

In '31 Rue Cambon,' the artist demonstrates how, in a culture of increasingly frictionless consumption and automated production, meaning can still emerge through the generative reinterpretation of an existing idea and the stubbornly physical act of making something by hand.

The artisanal spirit of the bricoleur animates Tom Sachs’s art, alongside a postmodern, deconstructive impulse aimed at interrogating the symbolic and narrative dynamics that establish material value. Large symbolic systems have long nourished his practice of sustained world-building. That was the case with his multi-year NASA project, Space Program (2007-present), through which he reimagined the mythology of the space mission through handcrafted sculptures made from everyday materials like plywood, cardboard, foam core, duct tape and hot glue. Sachs had done something similar earlier with Nutsy’s (2003-2005), which linked the idealistic modernism of Le Corbusier with the commercialized modernism of McDonald's.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Building on this legacy, the provocative American artist has unveiled his latest endeavor: a homemade and unauthorized Chanel flagship in Chinatown. Notably, the street where it is located, Centre Street, with Maman and Champagnerie on either side, is now called “Little Paris,” as a sign hanging next door suggests, adding an eerie coincidence, an ironic dimension or perhaps simply a synchronicity of chance to an operation that brings Chanel’s historic 31 Rue Cambon boutique in Paris to Chinatown.

“I just like making stuff,” Sachs told Observer when we met for a preview of the project in late August. Entering from the side door, we found his studio far tidier than one might expect from the explosiveness of his creativity—it was almost unnervingly orderly. “Everything is really in the other rooms; you’ll see the chaos. This room is kind of empty because the show is finished,” he was quick to point out. “We just cleared it out, and I’m starting my next thing.”

Sachs’s studio is always in motion, as he’s always making something. “I’m not happy unless I have some little thing to make,” he said, recalling how he used to make rockets from dry-cleaning cardboard and telescoping tampon applicators, improvising with whatever materials were available. Although he was initially forbidden to use his father’s tools, he secretly took them from the basement. “My mother taught me to refinish furniture, paint, decorate and repair things because she was very handy, but I wasn’t allowed to use power tools. I was forbidden to use tools because my father didn’t really know how to use them either. His parents wanted him to become a pianist or a doctor. But we had tools in the basement, and I would sneak them.”

When he went to college, the rule-free sculpture department became a revelation. A girlfriend taught him to weld; after she broke up with him, Sachs threw himself into sculpture and hasn’t stopped making since. In front of us is a strange sculpture in which pieces of a rubber chicken have been pieced together, transforming it into an alien-like assemblage that says a great deal about his unfiltered imagination.

31 Rue Cambon originated out of the same philosophical framework and follows many of the protocols of his long-running Space Program and other series he has pursued in the past. They all operate as expansive Gesamtkunstwerke: systems through which Sachs can pursue his interests in bricolage, research, engineering, ritual and fabrication.

These large symbolic systems provide him with the necessary pretext for sustained world-building. “You need a pretext to begin building a new world, something with enough breadth that I can keep expanding it and understand different things, so I can go really deep into the railings or the tweed,” Sachs explained. The result is a practice that simultaneously celebrates human inventiveness and exposes the dynamics shaping the contemporary myths all of us consume. “When I made Space Program, I focused on the parts of the journey to other worlds that I’m interested in. Similarly, when I take you into my homemade Chanel boutique, it’s not really about fashion; it’s about my interests and obsessions with these things: how they’re made, the stories behind them, why they matter, my desires and ambitions.”

This time the framework is what he calls retail ecstasy. “Men don’t collect cameras to take pictures of people; they collect them to impress their other lonely-guy friends,” Sachs quipped. “I wanted a Chanel suit, not because I was going to wear one—I’m not that kind of guy. I just wanted one to be part of that symbolic universe. And when I made one, I loved it so much I made 20 more.”

Over the past year, Sachs has been studying Coco Chanel’s mythology, and he is particularly fascinated by the house’s métiers, ateliers and artisanal traditions because he sees a relationship to his own obsession with making. At the core of the installation is a critical interrogation of the mythology of luxury through the lens of bootleg culture, exposing the fragile boundaries between authenticity, desire and mass consumption.

Sachs’s fascination with the Chanel brand dates back to 1998, when he created the Chanel guillotine now in the Centre Pompidou collection. With 31 Rue Cambon, Sachs recreates aspects of Chanel’s Parisian mythology while materially undermining them. He has crafted both the exterior and interior of the boutique in painstaking detail, using his own hands (and those of his studio assistants).

Sachs’s version of the chandelier in Coco Chanel’s salon matches the scale of the original but is constructed from meticulously cut bicycle reflectors, fishing weights and UV dental epoxy. It hangs from the ceiling of an almost claustrophobic foyer, where mirrors covering the walls create an illusion of depth while........

© Observer