10 Corso Como is at once a reaction and a response to this change and, from a certain standpoint, it represents the necessary evolution of the boutique. Except for the Fiorucci Stores in Milan and New York, boutiques were exclusively focused on fashion clothes and accessories. By widening the number and nature of the objects displayed and sold, the concept carried to its final conclusion the idea that contemporary culture is above all a material culture that reflects itself in a series of objects of things. Today identity is a matter of style and no longer a matter of class, race, religion, salary, or ideology. But style is not made of purely sartorial elements any more: today it invests the indefinite and unlimited series of human artifacts, any object or thing produced in our days. Which means that all relations with things (and not only the one constructed through dress)—from food to contemplation, from furniture to the fastest consumables—become spaces and instruments for the construction of a personal, cultural, and social style and identity. Conversely, things are no longer functional instruments but expressions of a style, of an identity, of a certain form of culture. To put together, to display, and to sell things is the form of making culture that becomes privileged today.
Yet on the other hand the store concept means not only radicalizing the classical model of the boutique but also transforming it. Traditional boutiques were already spaces conceived for the purpose of producing a total aesthetic experience, beginning with the architectural project for their space—a project that was often associated with great creators. Rive Gauche, opened by Yves Saint Laurent, was thought of as a small museum: from Eduardo Arroyo’s portrait of the stylist to Isamu Noguchi’s lamps and to the statues Niki de Saint Phalle presented inside the court, everything appeared to have been fashioned so as to make the medium coincide with the object of the aesthetic experience. The store became the metaphysical place whose function was to prove that art can give shape, chisel everyday life down to its minutest details: not only the shape and appearance of clients’ anatomical bodies, but also the space of these portable works of art—the clothes of a great fashion house—is itself a work of art. From this point of view, the boutique is a space that has to render the white box impossible, to destroy the distance between object and space. But because it proposed first of all clothes—and first of all clothes that express a given style, a given tendency, a given idea of fashion—the store was fated to become again, in time, a marginal space, a place where tendencies and styles were produced, consumed, and forgotten, all in one breath. The concept store went one step further: the point was no longer to elaborate a certain style and to oppose it to the current hegemonic style, or to become the motor of history in order to allow the mind to shuttle from one style to another. Today 10 Corso Como operates an abstraction: it isolates style as such, not as a sum or as an eclectic and confused selection of what the street and the worldly salons propose and accept, but as an absolute requirement. The point is not to adhere to one style or another: the invitation to embrace Alexander McQueen’s and Martin Margiela’s propensity for crossdressing or Rei Kawakubo’s antifashion minimalism, punk or hipster, is replaced by the attempt to delimit style as an eternal fact, no longer tied to time and to the present. The store becomes a kind of Noah’s ark of a universal style, in which the most valued artifacts are saved from the tempest of history.
Changes occur in the detail, progressively: the whole remains, something changes, the adventure continues. “Everything has to change if everything is to continue,” according to prince Salina’s famous aphorism in The Leopard, which is so right. But, if we want something to change, the change has to be subtle, mobile, the transformation invisible and silent at the beginning, before it reveals itself, in all the brutal and sometimes rough splendor of the revolution. This is the conscience that animates 10 Corso Como. The Milanese institution thus stands in counterpoint to our time and to the relation we keep with it. This is how we can understand the relation of this place with photography: Carla Sozzani’s interest instills duration and structure into photography—otherwise art of the moment, dream of immediacy. This is what she finds in her historical studies on form, in Japanese photography of the nineteenth century, which she collects; among these photographers she admires so much, such as Francesca Woodman; in the broad history of fashion photography, where everything seems alive and nothing is ever a given; and in these photographers she defends, whose careers she has built, whose thoughts she shares—such as Paolo Roversi, a magician who transforms the moment. That is also the source of her passion for sepia photography—which embodies a dream of timelessness, the persistence of a model technologically outdated and therefore all the more right.
She cuts through our accelerated temporality where it accelerates most, to the point of becoming, more than ever, the symbol of the present: fashion. Style has always been the spirit of the age manifesting itself in clothing—this kind of osmosis between the general look of things and people, the zeitgeist, and clothing itself, with its exact rules, its texture, its merciless requirement of technical expertise. What prevails today is, beyond doubt, the zeitgeist, which is a changing and unstable spirit, proclaiming global and permanent revolutions that concern directly only a minority—and yet, by extension, entire nations. The rules of clothing are abandoned; and the general look—what one sees in the streets—is totally disconnected from the proposals that the world of fashion puts before our eyes.
10 Corso Como makes use of fashion—the domain of clothing, which is its initial and principal field—to offer the exact counterpoint to what fashion itself has become. The Milanese institution evokes its antiquity through the exhibitions that are associated with the collections on display: therein is a great history of the image of fashion and of its creators themselves, from Horst to Cardin. At the same time, since its very beginning, it has given special support to the adventure of those who represented, in the world of clothing, a current opposed to this uninterrupted acceleration that dominates the fashion world: Azzedine Alaïa, a couturier who firmly opposed “trends,” preferring to study the changes in the woman’s body and to propose answers that seemed to her most in tune with the body’s own movements—a high or low placement of the waistline, bodily measurements, an opening to all bodies, no matter what they are like; and also the imposition of a prêt-à-porter that was as beautiful, neat, and precise as couture. He proposed a vision of clothing in which the futilities of the event give way to the arrival of a more lasting time, and hence a time whose manifestation matters more than anything that will vanish in a hurry.
Rei Kawakubo from Comme les Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, whose monograph she brought to fruition: for Rei Kawakubo, deconstruction of clothing, destructuration of its imposed order for the sake of entering, with him, into an ever more radical logic of clothing lines—which, filled with awareness of style, position themselves facing another order, that of carried sculpture [sculpture portée], as if it were a manifestation of alterity; for Yohji Yamamoto, permanent tension between the maintenance of an order of couture and the establishment of creative disorder. Martin Margiela, whom Carla Sozzani was one of the first to feature: reuse of rejected clothes and their transformation into couture, an updating of the margins, which are improved.
Each one of these is a break from the falsely assertive temporality of the system of fashion: from archeology to antagonism, to the independent path of tendencies, these are positionings outside the system itself, yet they remain at its core, because 10 Corso Como—by itself and through all the revivals it has given rise to throughout the world, from Los Angeles and New York to Paris and London, let alone all these multibrands transformed into living places—has contributed to the history of the system of fashion, as the latter has constructed itself over the past thirty years.
The great force of 10 Corso Como, of the relationship it has with the contemporary world, derives from being permanently set at an angle, of using as its principles the axioms of counterpoint—archeology, antagonism, ataraxy —and, at the same tim
e, of never refusing the new and revisited brands, which might seem detached from their original horizon, of integrating even Moschino’s irony and the postmodernism of Vêtements. The aim is not to position oneself contra mundum, to refuse the world as it is; rather it is to integrate it, to keep it close at heart, putting at its core even the tensions that generate its density. Many brands make up 10 Corso Como: brands of clothing, books, the presence of artists, exhibitions, all are part of this densified and intense present that is on offer there—a transitory present, but one in dialogue with the feeling of the eternal.
Intensity could be described as a “modern sickness”—the fascination of our civilization with the intensification of an existence considered insufficiently spirited in itself. We used to do everything we could to intensify our existence so as to live in the present. 10 Corso Como represents an extremely elaborate system of intensification; yet its intensification is neither loud nor violent. It is an intensification through peace, which places everything in the horizon of what counts for the great values of beauty and harmony.
These are, of course, classical, aristocratic values; and one cannot help thinking that Carla Sozzani, who has imposed them on two of the world’s continents, between Asia and America, is from Mantova and has grown up in this city, which hosts one of the most perfect examples of harmonious accomplishment in art: she has seen, as a child, Mantegna’s Camera degli sposi (Bridal Chamber); she has seen his perfect figures of courtiers dancing with one another. And it was this universe that she has sought to perpetuate: a human universe that ensures that through Gandhara, the Buddhas and the Apollos can look like each other.
Whoever walks into 10 Corso Como will have a strange sense of eternity, of something that goes beyond the limits of an era. No doubt, if the Eternal were to enter 10 Corso Como, it would feel to what extent things are transitory. 10 Corso Como is, for our time, an equivalent of what the Buddhas of Gandhara represented for civilizations: a space in which two different spaces, hence in tension, meet and unite. In this space the two orders are porous vis-à-vis each other and hence can communicate, so that at any point in time you find there the two perceptible realities, depending on what you are looking for: the eternal and the absolutely transitory.
This order of time exists in us, and it also exists outside us. This is how we can understand its presence within the garden. 10 Corso Como is a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden where miracles take place—on this account it is separated from the world and battles with nature; but by force of being conclusus, the garden is one of a domesticated nature, of a nature that is already human; the humanity that found its theater at 10 Corso Como aims quite rightly at a dream of nature. If the place is a hortus conclusus, at the same time it represents a domus aperta [open house]. The hanging gardens that appear intermittently are a sign of this tendency. Fashioned from human materials by human hands, they nonetheless reproduce the face of nature, and they succeed in creating an even more magical illusion of it than is the nature now gone from our cities. This double movement is permanent in these places.
The importance of 10 Corso Como within the history of fashion, and even within fashion industry history, is well known. It is enough to recall that, as is often remarked, it was with reference to 10 Corso Como that the expression “concept store” was used for the first time—an expression about to be used ad libitum soon after, in a plethora of press reviews and articles. In this phrase the term “concept” is often understood in a journalistic sense. A “concept” would be a form of advertising presentation that unites different things under the umbrella of a single approach. In this capacity, the concept would be nothing but a gaze—that of the curator, the director of transitory museum, in other words Carla Sozzani. There would be, then, a contradiction in terms, since the principle of a concept, as it is defined in philosophy in the aftermath of Plato’s eidos [form], is exactly the reverse of the gaze: it is the intangible and supreme reality that the gaze is attempting to embrace, albeit never succeeding more than in part.
There are grounds for taking this expression seriously and for realizing that what definitely transpires in all the things on display in 10 Corso Como has to do with this sublime horizon of the eidos even more than with the concept itself. Eidos is what the mind captures in a moment of ecstasy, what Malraux had once called the “absolute” captured in a moment of “elusiveness.” The force of 10 Corso Como is to capture the soul exactly when it is ready to abandon itself to consumption—to this frenzy of a jolly distraction, which is also the dissolution of its hope—and to launch it toward meditation and peace. Such is the use of this total installation, the place itself, which reproduces itself in this way from city to city.
We can also discern the influence that this model has exerted upon another of these institutions of commerce: Dover Street Market, which opened in 2004 at its London address, in the image of its Milanese source of inspiration, and from there replicated itself in Tokyo, in collaboration with 10 Corso Como, in order to open later in New York, Los Angeles, and Singapore. But Dover Street Market is directly associated with the brand from which it emanates, namely Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons. We can also think of Colette, in Paris from 1996 to 2017, who built the structure of the bar, of the store carrying souvenirs, objects, clothing, designs, books, and so on, around a certain vision of the world; and the term itself has spread into metropoles and even into smaller cities, where it can be found today, an English term for a Milanese creation of concept stores. And yet 10 Corso Como is not only the archetype of the concept store but carries this worldview that separates it from multibrands such as Harrod’s or Liberty’s in London, Bergdorf Goodman and Sacks in New York, the Bon Marché and the Galeries Lafayette in Paris—or formerly Maria Luisa, also in Paris.
The more other concept stores carry in them merely the name of the original “concept”—for their primary aim is disruption, interruption, the iterative crises of taste, which block the path toward transcendence and display the image of an immanence that battles without respite the danger of exhaustion—the more is 10 Corso Como a real boutique of the concept, because it makes the concept manifest and accessible in things—which are only its fragments. This is the reason why, much as from a museum, we can take from 10 Corso Como any number of “derivatives”: pens, umbrellas, t-shirts. They are a kind of emanation of the absolute eidos [Platonic form] of the museum, which has been given to embrace a moment of time, down here. There is in this, of course, a persistence of the civilization of the derivative product—but this derivative product is not simply a reduction of the aura of images sanctified by profane societies, in an extension of Baudelaire’s diagnostic, then Benjamin’s. Every object taken from 10 Corso Como is without image: the letters of the name are visible, together with a few features, but no representation is offered.
The eidos displayed there is an eidos without a masterpiece, without a strong image; an eidos where the form itself of the experience offered there embodies access to the ideal; an eidos that allows us to grasp an experience beyond the moment, yet an experience firmly bound to the contemporary in all its forms, provided that they are harmonious.
10 Corso Como is, after all, a political creation —in the sense that it reminds human beings about to give themselves to it what this single fact of living as human beings means. The place is a forum of harmonies assembled in a single sound; these harmonies do not refuse dissonance. Much to the contrary. They make it integrate with itself because, just as the great image has no form, great harmony has no contained perfection. Just as the place is open to all, in all cities where it happens to be, in reality, beyond the objects themselves, it asks for an engagement with existence. It is both the most democratic—open place, free admission—and the most demanding.
At the very moment when politics was building itself as a unified global space—when it became a fragmented space, in which all identities were forced to be in relation with one another from now on, to situate themselves vis-à-vis one anot
her, often even in individuals who brought some together in conflict and did not accept it—at that very moment we tried to forget what constitutes the specific feature of being human: the finitude, the dream of sacredness that possess us, “animals and humans” that we are. 10 Corso Como reminds us of this dream of sacredness, which is ours and dominates its powerful and subtle architecture; it reminds us of it with objects, though them. For at 10 Corso Como we know that objects are just a transient means to go beyond a transitory experience. It is a construction that seems to open for us the happy possibility of a life without us; and this construction is, of course, our own. This construction fascinates us because it recalls the possibility of a human time outside the time of humans—this possibility we had forgotten about, caught as we are in our lives, caught in our rhythms.
The Transitory Museum Page 8