The Best Chanel Money Can’t Buy

The most impressive garments I’ve encountered so far at New York Fashion Week were made of three-quarter-inch plywood.

Their tags say Chanel, and they hang at a boutique with the address 31 Rue Cambon painted on the door — only they are a creation of Tom Sachs, a wackadoo bricolage art wizard.

“I really wanted a Chanel suit, but I’m not the kind of guy that can wear one,” Sachs said at a preview of the installation, which opens today at 245 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. “But I wanted one as a flex to go in my closet next to my, like, Gore-Tex raincoat.”

So Sachs made one in his favored material: plywood. Then he made 30 more. Many are named for their famous wearers: Anna for Anna Wintour. Marge for Marge Simpson. More than a dozen jackets and pantsuits were on display in Sachs’s faux storefront. Other suits channeling Chanel creations worn by ASAP Rocky and G-Dragon were still in progress elsewhere in Sachs’s labyrinthine atelier.

To grasp the weave of a given wool, the glint of the gold buttons, the twinkle of Chanel’s Scottish tweeds, Sachs said he and members of his studio had leafed through eBay listings of decades-old Chanel jackets. He visited the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for some up-close scrutinizing of aging Chanel garments. Conveniently, his wife, the writer Sarah Hoover, owns a number of Chanel pieces, allowing Sachs some at-home studying.

The suits are all roughly the same size (I’d clock it at a 34), with a built-in double C hanger. From across the shop, they looked wavy around the edges and a bit cartoonish, like what Lola Bunny might wear to a court date.

Up close, though, you could almost be fooled by the intricate patterns created by layers of paint — applied by syringe — to mimic Chanel’s famous fabric. Until you touched them and realized they were as coarse as, well, paint on cheap wood.

It wasn’t only dresses, though. Sachs’s boutique was completist in its found-object mishmash: heels and flap bags were made of cardboard; brooches were crafted from Legos and shattered champagne bottles; and a chandelier in the foyer, duping one from Chanel’s Parisian maison, was fabricated from bike reflectors and fishing weights.

It was all disarming and charming. As if Sachs had reconstructed the store from memory with whatever was at hand.

Sachs has toyed with luxury consumerism before, but Chanel is a particular target. It is arguably the most well known of all Parisian luxury properties. It’s synonymous with haute fashion and sophistication. And at the moment, there is a mania swirling about the brand, fueled by scarcity; glowing press coverage of its new designer, Matthieu Blazy; and plain peer pressure.

Sachs punted on spelling out any broader message with the installation, but it’s this mounting, ravenous luxury consumerism that he seemed to be picking at. When you buy a Chanel suit now, you’re really, in some part, buying bragging rights. To own it is the thing. Sachs’s work seemed to ask, Do you even need to wear a Chanel suit to feel satisfied by it?

As for Sachs’s wooden versions, they can’t be bought at all. He said he thought of the installation as one complete work and that it was, for now, not for sale.

Other things worth knowing about:

Somewhere between designing roughly 742 Dior collections a year, Jonathan Anderson found time to do the costumes for Luca Guadagnino’s new A.I. cautionary tale, “Artificial.” From the trailer it looks as if Anderson at least got Sam Altman’s way-too-skinny jeans right.
Princess Diana’s “revenge dress” is going back up for auction in December.
Taste, a purveyor of vintage in Los Angeles whose offerings a shoppy West Coast friend of the newsletter described as “very Samantha Jones-coded,” opened a New York showroom in the WSA Building.
After nine years, James Veloria, the first to put racks of 1990s and early-aughts Margiela and Helmut Lang in a dim corner of a Chinatown mall under the Manhattan Bridge, has moved to a new, brighter and bigger storefront at 24B Henry Street.
Between shows, we’ve been debating whether Celine’s new Reeboks are actually good. They’re a simple shoe — no logo on the side, very little paneling. But many people seemed to want them, in no small part because of the styling of the campaign, with full athletic looks out of a Benetton ad from the ’80s, artfully laid on the floor. A British editor known for her excellent taste said she would only want the white ones, but the Fashions team was most drawn to the Twizzler red and caramel-brown versions. Still, as with most luxury-brand sneakers, the price prohibits us from endorsing without a caveat: They’re $750. (Joke’s on us though, as the shoes are already sold out online.)

What we’re reading and watching:

Gramparents, a winsome Instagram account cataloging seniors’ style, is releasing a zine this week. Read it and heed the style wisdom of your elders.

Lucien Smith, who shot to mega-world super fame before he was even out of college, has died at 37. Smith’s career was, at many angles, a blue-chip cautionary tale: His paintings soared to six-figure auction prices, only to float back to earth when speculative collectors moved on to a newer name. Yet Smith, a California native with an impish air, found new outlets. He started Serving the People, a nonprofit supporting other artists, and most recently, FOOD, a restaurant on the Lower East Side, reviving an art-world hub from the ’70s.
Emilia Petrarca, of the Substack Shop Rat, on her decision to give up sponcon.
“Have you read it?” — 50 percent of people on Lauren Collins’s profile of Nadège Vanhée in The New Yorker. “Have you seen the photos?” — the other 50 percent.

Ask Vanessa

I am confused by the lengths of men’s pants. Is there a right length and a wrong length, and how do you know what is right for you? — Peter, Toronto.

The other day I was strolling around Midtown at lunchtime amid various bankers and other white-collar professionals, and I have never seen so many different lengths of pants. Read more.