TOM SACHS BUILDS CHANEL'S 31 RUE CAMBON BY HAND

Coco Chanel used to sit on the fifth step of a mirrored staircase at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris, watching her own runway shows reflected back at her without ever being seen. Tom Sachs is rebuilding that staircase, and the boutique underneath it, out of plywood and glue at his studio on Centre Street in Manhattan. He is not licensing the image or printing a poster of it. He is building the object with his own hands, which is the only kind of tribute his studio has ever known how to pay.

September 11, Six PM, One Locked Door

The installation, titled 31 Rue Cambon, opens Friday, September 11, 2026, at 245 Centre Street in Manhattan, the address that has doubled as Sachs' studio and his Bodega storefront for years. Doors open at 6pm and close at 8pm on opening night, and the piece stays up through October 10. Admission is free but space is extremely limited, and the studio has set a narrow public schedule for the rest of the run instead of a standing open door: Thursdays 6 to 8pm, Fridays 6 to 8pm, Saturdays 1 to 6pm, six hours a week for a month, no digital preview offered as a substitute for the walk in.

Sachs Has Rebuilt NASA Before, Not Just Retail

Sachs built a full scale replica of NASA's Apollo Lunar Excursion Module out of plywood and steel for his 2012 show Space Program, then staged a fabricated mission crew inside it at the Park Avenue Armory for six weeks. His work now sits in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Smithsonian, all built from the plywood and glue he is using on Centre Street this month. A Chanel boutique is a smaller structure than a lunar module, but the method has not changed since Space Program: measure the object, then rebuild it slightly wrong on purpose, so the seams show and the hand stays visible. A luxury house cut down to studio materials showed up in sneakers this summer too, when Vans built its Old Skool 36 Souvenir around Chanel's On the Pavements bag, swapping leather for bouclé Sidestripes at a fraction of the retail price. Sachs is not selling anything at 245 Centre. He is building the whole store and giving the door away for free.

A Mirrored Staircase Led to Her Private Apartment

Gabrielle Chanel moved into 31 Rue Cambon in 1918, eight years after she opened her first hat shop two doors down at number 21. The mirrored staircase went in during the 1920s, connecting her second floor apartment to the couture salon below, and she used the fifth step as her private box, watching buyers react to her collections in a mirror before anyone knew she was there. Chanel spent years restoring that apartment for visitors, treating a 1920s stairwell as heritage worth preserving rather than a Paris curiosity. An artist folding a luxury house's own codes back into a handmade object is not new this year either. Jonathan Anderson did it at Dior, translating sculptor Lynda Benglis' chicken wire technique into silver netting for his second couture collection at the Musee Rodin. Sachs skips the runway and the museum wall entirely and goes straight for the architecture, four flights up from street level in Manhattan instead of six floors up from the Place Vendome.

Free to Enter, Impossible to Guarantee

Across the run, the only way in is Thursday evening, Friday evening, or Saturday afternoon, and the studio is small enough that a full house is a hard cap on attendance, not a marketing line borrowed from a bigger gallery. Nothing about 31 Rue Cambon is built to travel afterward. The plywood staircase will not survive a crate to Basel, and Sachs has closed a storefront on this block before. Bodega ran two years at the same Centre Street address, then shut for good in 2016 with no second location and no online archive to replace it. October 10 is not a soft date to extend if the crowds show up. It is the day the boutique that never sold anything closes and the studio goes back to being just a studio.