WSJ : ‘31 Rue Cambon’ Review: Tom Sachs’s Handmade Haute Couture The artist has

‘31 Rue Cambon’ Review: Tom Sachs’s Handmade Haute Couture
The artist has opened his own Chanel pop-up store where plywood dresses simultaneously honor the brand while critiquing consumer culture.

New York
A few blocks north of Canal Street, where tourists pick up fake designer bags for a fraction of what the genuine articles retail for, another kind of luxury mimicry has emerged. Tucked in an unassuming building on Centre Street is “31 Rue Cambon,” a “Chanel pop-up” from the artist and designer Tom Sachs. Inside are some of the couture brand’s most iconic looks, rendered in plywood and acrylic paint and neatly arranged in the sparsely populated layout used by boutiques to let visitors know that if they need to ask for a price they really shouldn’t be shopping there. Are these garments forgeries? Replicas? Dupes? Homages?
“Liz” (2026). 31 Rue Cambon
Yes, yes, yes and yes. In short, this collection is many layered, like Mr. Sachs himself. An artist whose own creations are unambiguously handmade, he is also obsessed with the mass production of McDonald’s and the scientific exactitude of NASA manufacturing. In his work it’s easy to find a critique of consumer culture, but he has also collaborated with Nike on shoes sought by sneakerheads.
This latest project takes its name from the address in the swanky 1st arrondissement of Paris where Coco Chanel lived in an iconic apartment above her boutique. Entering Mr. Sachs’s store, visitors find themselves in an antechamber surrounded by mirrors—an obvious play for the selfie-obsessed crowd, but one that evokes Chanel’s mirrored staircase, atop which she would spy on her well-heeled clientele, reading their reactions to her bespoke creations. Lording over this space is a chandelier based on one in the designer’s home, but now made of materials that cast haute couture in New York’s history: Fishing weights nod to one of the city’s bygone industries, woks echo the tastes of nearby Chinatown, and reflectors from now-ubiquitous Citi Bikes sparkle in the light.
Push open a mirrored door and you find yourself in the main salesroom. A low-slung ceiling and a moody soundtrack that mixes snippets from Chanel ads, low-key techno, and bits from horror scores lend the bright space a slightly ominous quality that further heightens the thought-provoking oppositions that underpin the show—real vs. copy, luxury products vs. humble materials, capitalism vs. anti-consumerism.
Handbags, sunglasses and shoes at the store. 31 Rue Cambon
That final point is especially acute when one considers that nothing here is actually for sale. Whether it’s a Birkin bag from Hermès or a Daytona watch from Rolex, there are certain luxury goods that you can’t just walk in off the street and purchase, but they can still be acquired—if you’re willing to wait long enough and generate enough “spend history” with a brand. But with the clothing and accessories in Mr. Sachs’s show, the unobtainability of the goods on view is the very point, reinforcing the idea that our desire for ownership transcends the utility of an object—no one can wear a plywood dress—and is rooted in the object itself.
Detail of ‘Liz.’ 31 Rue Cambon
This fetishism straddles the worlds of high-end products and high-end art, both realms where wait lists are common, and connections and prestige are just as important as currency itself. This also sets Mr. Sachs’s project apart from Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store.” That forebear was a 1961 pop-up where the artist made and sold his own rough-hewn goods. Those, however, were much more quotidian in nature—slices of pie, humble shoes—and circumvented the traditional gallery-to-collector pipeline, with Oldenburg thumbing his nose at the commercialized art establishment. Mr. Sachs’s project is democratic as well. But where Oldenburg aimed to make art universally accessible, Mr. Sachs is making it universally inaccessible. Anyone could buy art from “The Store”; no one can buy art from “31 Rue Cambon.”
‘Diana’ (2025). 31 Rue Cambon
This leveling of the field between collectors and noncollectors, potential buyers and the just-browsing, the affluent and the hard up is a major strength of the conceptual element of the project, and forces one to focus on the art itself. And in these creations we find a wealth of details, impressive from both a technical standpoint in their fealty to the garments being copied. Individual strands of acrylic paint are extruded from syringes, dried, and woven into the blazer-and-skirt ensemble “Anna.” The faces of lions are delicately piped in three dimensions on the buttons of a piece based on a suit worn by Elizabeth Taylor. The fabric of the sky-hued bouclé skirt suit that Princess Diana wore to Prince William’s confirmation is recreated here by painting the form white, covering it in another coat of pale blue, then scraping away the top layer with a comb.
Shoes made of cardboard come with their own boxes that are literally branded with the house’s logo, the pyrographic type contributing to the DIY feel of the items, while bags include all the pockets and hardware that the real purses do. Not everything here is a copy, though. Brooches that refer to various Chanel collections are assembled out of Legos, bits of Star Wars action figures, and other bric-a-brac, gleaming in jewelry cases and elevating these childish materials. The only thing for sale at Mr. Sachs’s store might be contemplative contradictions, but I for one am buying.
31 Rue Cambon
Tom Sachs Studio, 245 Centre St., through Oct. 10