A passing
glance through the windows of oki-ni might leave one thinking that London’s
Savile Row is home to a new gallery. Neat piles of felt traverse the
modishly bare space. It might be a Joseph Beuys installation except for the
jeans hanging on the wall. However, the gallery aesthetic is not simply an
alluring front. Oki-ni – which means ‘thank you’ in Osaka dialect – is an
on-line business that sells designer clothes in ultra-limited editions. The
store is its showcase. You can browse and try things on, you just won’t be
leaving with any shopping bags.
The store was designed by 6a Architects, a young British practice that won
the commission by competition. Their brief was to design a physical space
for the virtual shop which could be readily reproduced in a string of
concessions. The gallery feel owes less to the exclusiveness of the products
than to the absence of those things, apart from the walls, that make a shop:
some stock and a till. Business, as it were, has been consigned to a pair of
laptops. Other internet retailers may have dispensed with outlets
altogether, but clearly, if you’re going to spend £350 on a pair of Adidas
trainers made from wolf-fish skin, then you’ll probably want to try them on.
With this in mind, 6a has created an atmosphere conducive to appreciation.
At Savile Row the architects inserted a fan-shaped tray made of Russian oak
into the space’s concrete shell. Its floor slopes gently upwards (if this
were a Vito Acconci installation the artist would be lying underneath
somewhere) and its low walls leave space around the actual edges of the
room, concealing changing rooms and some stairs into the office below. There
are no clothes rails, mannequins or stacked shelves. Instead of furniture
the architects used industrially produced felt mats arranged in long piles.
The felt offers more than a functional, minimalist aesthetic; it is also a
tactile presence, the decidedly undigital antidote to the virtual shop.
Used in this particular way, the material is unavoidably evocative of the
work of Joseph Beuys, the godfather of installation art. Indeed, it just so
happens that 6a acquired their felt from Beuys’s former supplier. In a neat
resolution, the qualities that have endeared felt to the Tartar nomads (by
whose hands Beuys was famously saved from freezing) were seized upon by 6a
to create swift, adaptable and distinctive designs for the concession
market. The first concession so far, in the Flannels department store in
Leeds, consists solely of felt hanging from the wall, resting on the floor
and piled beneath a couple of laptops. What could be simpler?
The artistic associations may not be lost on oki-ni’s customers, for the
store is clearly targeting the culturally literate as well as the fashion
literate (and the affluent). Witness the books and magazines on art and
design deployed with the same casualness and familiarity with which the
jeans and shirts dangle from the oak walls. Oki-ni offers an understated
form of commerce where the spotlight is as much on the experience as the
product, where what is ostensibly on sale is the lifestyle of the artistic
elite. The architects are presenting a model of consumerism consistent with
its evolving role in contemporary society. Shopping, as Rem Koolhaas would
have it, has insinuated itself in most forms of urban experience so that
there is relatively little distinguishing the airport and the museum
bookstore from the shopping mall.
Fashion’s flirtation with art is certainly not new, nor is the symbiosis of
shopping and entertainment. Increasingly, though, fashion is seeking to rub
smooth whatever distinctions may still linger between high and low. Koolhaas
is one willing accomplice: not only has he designed three stores for Prada
in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, he has also designed the
Guggenheim’s new museum in Las Vegas which is attached to the hyper-kitsch
Venetian Casino and Hotel. See also the Jenny Holzer installations in Helmut
Lang’s SoHo store or, perhaps most eager of all, the Comme des Garçons shop
designed by Future Systems in the heart of Chelsea, Manhattan’s gallery
district. One might see the reconceptualising of the fashion store as a
defence against the fashion-for-accessible-prices of chains like H&M or Zara.
‘Rarity is a proof of innocence’ reads the epigraph on the oki-ni website: a
euphemistic reminder, if we needed one, that exclusivity is the surest way
to guarantee desire.
The jeans in oki-ni may not be art, but they approach the price and match
the rarity of the limited edition artwork. Andreas Gursky’s photograph of
shoes on sanctified display in a Prada store makes the point succinctly.
However, 6a have succeeded in avoiding Prada’s temple-of-fashion ethos. The
emphasis, with the soft oak and softer felt, is very much one of comfort and
leisure. This is the new, human face of internet retailing. Oki-ni may not
offer the instant gratification of other shopping experiences, nor will it
offer the intellectual stimulus of real art. But if you constantly suppress
the urge to touch things in galleries, then it’s probably the only place
where you can lie on the installation and try on the limited edition.
Justin McGuirk is a freelance art and architecture critic