inside tom sachs’ handmade ’31 rue cambon’, plywood becomes chanel couture

Tomas Kauer - News Writer and News Moderator

inside tom sachs’ handmade ’31 rue cambon’, plywood becomes chanel couture

a paris address rebuilt in new york

In 1918, Gabrielle Chanel bought 31 rue Cambon and gradually assembled her fashion house upward through the building. The boutique occupied the ground floor, the couture salons sat above, and the mirrored staircase became its most famous piece of interior architecture. Chanel could sit near the top and watch models descend through the fractured reflections below, seeing the clothes before the room could see her. Over time, the address acquired the aura usually reserved for a logo. Rue Cambon became shorthand for Parisian luxury.

A century later, the address has resurfaced on Centre Street in Manhattan. Tom Sachs has turned his longtime studio at 245 Centre Street into his own version of 31 Rue Cambon, beginning with cream awnings outside and black gates worked with interlocking Cs. Inside the exhibition, which is open to the public, the cues continue with beige carpet, mirrored walls, glass cases, and jackets arranged with the ceremonial spacing of couture.

While it’s almost convincing from a few feet away, it betrays itself when viewed up close. The stiff, quilted furniture is plywood. A chandelier gets part of its sparkle from bicycle reflectors. Sachs has reconstructed the atmosphere of Chanel while allowing almost every surface to confess how laboriously it’s been handcrafted.

tom sachs rue cambon
images © designboom

couture, according to plywood

Thirty-one suits line the installation, each translated into three-quarter-inch plywood and paint. Tom Sachs and his studio worked from Chanel looks worn across decades. They studied the proportions of jackets and skirts before recreating their surfaces with tools that one might find in a hardware store rather than a couture atelier.

Bouclé appears through paint dragged and thickened into texture, and buttons are painted in intricate detail. Some pieces take days to finish even though the raw material itself costs only a few dollars, which gives the whole operation the logic of a very expensive joke executed with complete seriousness.

A wall of accessories also become stranger when viewed up close. Slingbacks are rebuilt from cardboard and wood, and brooches pick up their sparkle from costume components and LEGO. The substitutions are so visible, yet the room still reads instantly as Chanel.

Sachs can replace cloth with scrap wood and precious materials with plastic, and the code survives. While the double C does some of the work, so do the proportions and patterning. It seems that luxury could be surprisingly portable once its visual grammar has been learned.

tom sachs rue cambon
Tom Sachs reconstructs 31 Rue Cambon inside his New York studio

learning luxury by rebuilding it

Sachs has spent much of his career taking culturally loaded objects apart and rebuilding them in the language of his studio. Spacecraft, sneakers, weapons, furniture, and branded goods have all passed through the same process, emerging in plywood, foam, tape, or whatever material lets the seams remain visible.

Chanel entered this vocabulary early on. In 1998, Chanel Guillotine (Breakfast Nook) attached the fashion house’s double-C insignia to a functioning guillotine, collapsing luxury branding and a device associated with revolutionary violence into one unnervingly polished object.

The new installation is gentler in appearance, but the fixation remains. Here, Sachs has spent an extraordinary amount of time reproducing the very things he is simultaneously reducing to paint and plywood.

tom sachs rue cambon
the storefront at 245 Centre Street borrows Chanel’s cream awnings and double-C gates