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

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A nighttime view of a handmade Chanel-inspired storefront with three cream awnings, illuminated display windows and sculptural suits flanking the entrance.

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.

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.”

A man wearing clear-framed glasses and a dark work jacket holding a roughly carved wooden sculptural head in an art-filled studio.

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.

A brightly lit display containing three white sculptural handbags, sunglasses and three pairs of white shoes presented on small boxes.

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 evoking the house’s iconic mirrored staircase, where Coco Chanel herself was famously photographed.

Further in are Sachs’s versions of Chanel’s iconic tweed suits, all rendered in plywood and synthetic polymer with the meticulous attention to detail characteristic of his signature hyperrealistic, deceptive quality. Hanging on racks, they are sacred simulacra of a timeless fashion cult. “My versions are generally the same size as the originals, even when the materials shift,” Sachs said.

Behind each suit are months of research and experimentation devoted to recreating, through acrylic paint, the extraordinary diversity of fabrics and finishes associated with the originals. Sachs and his team reproduced tweed, stitching, buttons, chains and other textile details through elaborate painting and fabrication techniques, while allowing the underlying materials and process to be seen.

Sachs had wanted to make Chanel suits from plywood for more than a decade but did not believe he possessed the technical ability to realize them properly until recently. His experiments painting Picasso compositions helped him reach what he considers the ideal level of virtuosity to create something technically accomplished but still visibly homemade.

Upstairs in his studio, where some of Sachs’s assistants were working on additional suits, the almost obsessive meticulousness and labor behind each piece was laid bare. Only in a few cases were they able to obtain textile samples. Most of the suits are based on photographs, often images of garments worn by celebrities such as Princess Diana, Naomi Campbell or Coco herself—women who became cultural icons of their eras and to whom individual pieces are dedicated. There is even a recreation of the intensely pink suit Marge Simpson wore in the seventh-season episode of The Simpsons, “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield.”

The figures attached to individual suits become part of the project’s wider reflection on cultural memory and fame. Sachs describes their fame as “the sunshine of the dead;” some names will remain widely recognizable while others will become obscure, but he sees the works as a record of who mattered at a particular cultural moment. They are not far from Warhol’s portraits, whose sitters may no longer be familiar to viewers but whose images retain their power. “Americans don’t necessarily know who Romy Schneider is. Outside the art world, many people don’t care about Mary Boone. People know Margot Robbie and Princess Diana. In a few hundred years—and certainly in a thousand years—it’s all dust. But I think this becomes a useful record of who we are now.”

For the Boone work, Sachs photographed a 1987 dress in the art dealer’s own apartment. For other pieces, he had to rely primarily on archival photographs and garments and fabric sections he studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fashion Institute collection. The translation from fabric to plywood proceeds through repeated material tests. Sachs and his team paint, comb, scrape, burn, extrude and layer acrylic media until they arrive at a surface that evokes the source textile while remaining unmistakably handmade. One jacket begins with black paint, followed by beige paint combed through while still wet, and then speckled to create the appearance of woven fibers. Another is punctured with a drill to produce a damaged, lace-like surface. Buttons and even chains are made entirely from acrylic paint extruded through medical syringes, peeled from silicone once dry and assembled link by link. For the chains, tiny acrylic links only a few millimeters wide are extruded onto silicone, peeled away once dry, shaped, cut and interlocked..

The research can seem almost forensic, and the studio closer at times to a scientific laboratory than an artist’s space. Sachs’s team consults museum archives, photographs and luxury resale sites, which document garments, labels, hardware and construction details with extraordinary precision. There is, fortuitously, also an incredible amount of information online, Sachs admitted. “Chanel fans are wild. Luxury resale sites document objects in astonishing detail. 1stDibs saved our lives.”

Every detail conceived and crafted by the Chanel atelier becomes an engineering problem in Sachs’s studio. A finished suit may take roughly 10 days to two weeks to execute, according to Sachs, but he emphasized that the experiments leading to the final technique often take much longer. But for him, those experiments are where the real play happens. Once the method is solved, production becomes comparatively straightforward.

Atop a set of shelves in 31 Rue Cambon are whitewashed cardboard versions of Chanel’s classic handbags, replicated down to their interiors. The same space also holds cardboard slingback heels, accompanied by cardboard boxes containing newspapers—a direct homage to On Kawara. Even the dimensions of the boxes reproduce those of Kawara’s originals.

Sachs’s boutique operates as a multisensory total environment. He and studio member Coleman Harshbarger created a soundtrack incorporating horror-movie music, Chanel advertisements, ambient sounds and pop tracks, adopting another mashup approach that freely draws musical material from different sources. The space smells of linseed oil warming in a crockpot. Although the sculptures are actually painted in acrylic, Sachs wants visitors to register the prestige and sensual associations of oil paint.

Framed on the walls and elegantly displayed in a cabinet are versions of Chanel’s iconic brooches, alongside new collections Sachs invented to reflect the technological age we are living in and what comes next. One series, Diamonds Are Forever, includes Maltese crosses and octagonal forms. Another, New Media, incorporates a Star Wars character alongside reflections on surveillance, screens and the attention economy. The historical Chanel jewelry is translated into radically different materials and mixed with extremely different iconography: bicycle reflectors, diamonds, broken Dom Pérignon glass and Lego.

Notably, many of these pieces are made from Lego bricks, a material Sachs sees as encapsulating much of his philosophy: a single plastic brick can generate entire worlds once imagination and making are brought into play. “There’s a great old Lego advertisement with a boy holding a single brick. It says, ‘This is a spaceship because Billy says it’s a spaceship,'” Sachs recalled. “I really believe in free play, where you invent your own thing. It’s much harder.” Sometimes, he added, when he is sad, he goes on eBay and buys vintage free-play sets.

Play remains a fundamental objective in his practice. Sachs describes his greatest challenge as “finding the discipline to be undisciplined,” carving out enough time, despite running a studio and raising a family, to experiment without an immediately productive goal. Then there’s his profound devotion to craftsmanship: the very act of making, and that fundamental, irreplaceable connection between mind and hand that has made human creativity possible and, more broadly, underpinned civilization through the continual interaction of nature and culture. “I want to enjoy the sensuality of touching wood and plastic,” Sachs said. “That’s my greatest pleasure and reward: educating and entertaining myself, and touching materials.”

Visible imperfection is important to him because it brings something undeniably human into the work. “The advantage the artist has over industry is that the artist can show fingerprints. I could never make something as good as an iPhone,” he considered. “I always want them to remain transparent about what they’re made from. You can see the plies. If you look closely, you see the marks from the jigsaw.” For him, the work must never disguise its own making.

Most importantly, he wants to “eliminate fashion” from the equation and ensure that the suits and accessories operate unequivocally as sculpture. “I want to make sure all of the accessories operate in the same way as the suits—that they’re art. This isn’t about fashion.” Fundamental to this operation is the establishment of rules and protocols. “I have lots of rules and guidelines. I’m hugely influenced by Conceptual art.” He cites Lucy Lippard and the dematerialization of the art object, alongside artists including On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono and Chris Burden, as major references within the philosophical and theoretical framework of his practice.

Nor does he deny a direct link to Duchamp’s legacy. “Without Duchamp, you don’t have any of that. He’s the originator,” Sachs acknowledged, though he also jokingly admits that he lacks the confidence simply to select an object and declare it art. He is too invested in making. “I wish I could make readymade work. When I was in college, I was very interested in it. But I don’t have the confidence to simply put a urinal somewhere. My reward and privilege is making the thing.”

The project also required Sachs to formulate what he calls Chanel’s “graphic standards,” including the house’s familiar palette of red, black, white, beige and gold and the geometric logic underlying its visual identity. Yet the abundance of counterfeit and derivative Chanel imagery online creates another problem: how to appropriate a recognizable symbolic system without sliding into kitsch. Sachs is particularly wary of what he sees as generic “Chanel punk,” steampunk aesthetics or oversized-object gimmicks: “I need to find something with an authentic voice that represents who I am. It’s a very fine line: how do you make a genuine fake? Otherwise it becomes kitsch, and that isn’t interesting.” And so strict rules became necessary. Establishing his own protocols, the artist added, has been essential to producing something that still feels authentic to his world. It is precisely here that the discipline of Conceptual art has proved especially useful.

When Observer asked whether the entire piece is best understood as copying, replication or appropriation, Sachs returned to a formative experience he had after moving to New York to explain his thinking around authenticity and originality. “I loved Mondrian. I thought: Okay, I just have to go down to Wall Street, work for 20 years, make a ton of money and then I can buy a Mondrian,” he recalled. On his way downtown, he bought a pair of fake Gucci sunglasses on Canal Street for five dollars, accidentally left them behind after lunch and realized he did not care because they were so inexpensive. “I realized that the $500 sunglasses, the real ones, own you. You don’t own them. The fake Gucci sunglasses are real Gucci sunglasses. They’re unauthorized, they’re made in China and they’re not as nice, but they’re still somehow Gucci sunglasses.”

A sculptural cream jacket with red and black trim, gold buttons and four pockets displayed on a handmade Chanel-style hanger.

The incident led Sachs to question what authenticity actually meant. Rather than spending decades accumulating enough capital to possess a Mondrian, he went to MoMA, studied one closely, even examining its reverse, and made his own version using gaffer’s tape. “I realized that it was much more authentic, even though it wasn’t made by Mondrian. I got to spend more time with that Mondrian than Eli Broad did,” he said. “So the desire to possess something is replaced, or sublimated, by the act of making it. Laying the tape, understanding it, building a spaceship or making a Chanel suit—that’s where the sensuality is. It isn’t in buying it with money or stealing it. It’s in making it.”

That distinction is fundamental to his work, though Sachs freely acknowledged that he is “a total pirate,” having entered the symbolic worlds of NASA, Chanel, Japanese tea ceremony and numerous consumer brands despite being neither a rocket scientist nor a couturier or Japanese tea master. But he believes the intensive labor of rebuilding those worlds allows him to find an authentic position within them and within the symbolic fictions that feed their value.

To illustrate the idea further, he turned to the history of Jamaican dub: “Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Bob Marley’s first producer, would listen at night to the AM radio coming from San Antonio in Texas, and then go into the studio the next morning and make a dub version. It was like a copy, but not exactly, because he couldn’t completely remember it.” The result was something recognizably connected to the source but materially transformed in its final form. Sachs also recounts how unsold American records were sometimes melted down and their vinyl reused for new Jamaican pressings, a spontaneous and resourceful practice of appropriation and repurposing that further complicates this history of cultural exchange and circulation. The earlier music became physically embedded in the material substrate of the new record even after its original grooves had disappeared. “Spiritually, James Brown is still in there, inside that plastic, even though you can’t hear it anymore,” Sachs joked.

He thinks of these kinds of invisible continuities as a kind of sympathetic magic. “I believe in the supernatural power of those connections. They’re intangible and difficult to explain or justify, but I believe in them,” he argued, adding that he has experienced this multiple times, as imaginative worlds he built for himself eventually crossed over into reality.

For instance, his homemade space program led to his being invited to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “I’ve also been offered the opportunity to fly with SpaceX. I did full astronaut training for a space mission, although in the end I decided not to go,” he added. Similarly, a fake Nike advertisement included in an early Space Program installation eventually led to a collaboration with the company. “It happened because I made it out of cardboard.”

The range of collaborations Sachs has participated in over the years point to the timeliness of his practice and the questions it raises around authenticity, originality and value. A handmade Chanel chainsaw or bricolaged spacecraft asks why one object is considered luxurious, technologically sophisticated or culturally authoritative while another is not. Craftsmanship, branding and institutional validation constantly collide.

Those questions feel even more urgent in the age of A.I., when images and ideas appear endlessly reproducible, appropriable and circulable with little effort, and the mechanization of human labor threatens to substitute not only for the hand but supposedly for aspects of the human mind. Yet even if large language models can mimic certain patterns of human reasoning, they cannot simply substitute for human creativity.

Sachs is skeptical about algorithmic taste. A.I.-powered recommendation systems can identify and feed back what someone already likes, he argued, but they rarely challenge taste. Social-media feeds already demonstrate how algorithms can flatten rather than expand aesthetic judgment, producing endless variations on familiar preferences without genuinely introducing new information. “It never gives me truly new information. It gives me what it thinks I want. After the first example, it becomes almost pornographic, like endlessly watching surfing videos. There’s no new information.”

Sachs’s homemade unauthorized Chanel flagship store will open in his studio in Chinatown, New York. Courtesy Tom Sachs Studio

When asked what he believes his art adds to a world already overloaded with objects and oversaturated with images, he once again resisted the language of “replica,” “copy” or “model.” And he was hesitant to claim that his versions necessarily add something objectively new. What they add for him, however, is the sensuality of making. He described his artistic process as a stone dropped into water: the first ring is himself and the studio team; the next includes engaged viewers and interlocutors; subsequent rings encompass people drawn to the work for entirely different reasons, because they love Chanel, hate Chanel, value the object’s expense or simply enjoy its form.

Sachs is comfortable with the divergent reactions his work triggers. “All of those reasons are acceptable to me,” he asserted. “I don’t want to judge someone’s opinion. Outside of that circle, maybe people like it because other people like it. Who knows? But I’m interested in the zone where dialogue happens.”

For Sachs, art’s purpose is modest but essential: it raises questions. It can help people “see the invisible,” or perhaps what is not yet visible. It can reveal mystical truths. “That’s all art can do, and that can help people,” he said, noting that he finds this capacity as often in music and film as in contemporary visual art.

Questions of authenticity, of what still constitutes genuine human expression and what can be considered culture, are perhaps more urgent than ever. We are living in a world where algorithmic feeds, frictionless production and the ambient expectation of optimization increasingly rule our lives, nudging us toward chasing measurable and provable outputs rather than questioning, exploring and generating meaning, as only a curious, inquisitive and playful approach allows.

The Dutch historian and cultural critic Johan Huizinga saw something of this coming almost a century ago. In Homo Ludens (1938), he argued that play is not marginal to civilization but, rather, generative of it. For Huizinga, law, philosophy, poetry and war all emerge from play’s “magic circle,” that space where ordinary rules of professionalization and optimization are suspended and something else becomes possible.

Amid this noise and these increasingly rational bounds, Sachs continues to dismantle the mythology of technological and consumer perfection by rebuilding its own icons through a methodological yet extremely playful, even ironic, approach to human labor dominated by improvisation and rituals of inventive craftsmanship and therefore still anchored in that fundamental generative axis between hand and mind, soul and material world. His work is all about that increasingly rare ability to embrace what the Greeks described as “eutrapelia”: the ability to be spontaneously well-turned, to play well and fully with the possibilities the world offers, and, even within the ordinary, to remain imaginatively and creatively real, a true self.

Sachs’s 31 Rue Cambon demonstrates how, even amid frictionless images and increasingly automated production, meaning can still emerge through the generative reinterpretation of an existing idea and the stubbornly physical act of making something by hand, creatively reinvented through a free wandering of the mind beyond the logic imposed by our society: “Making things well, learning through making them, protecting the sensuality of materials—is really at the center of everything I’m doing.”