Before it was a street, it was more of a sewer than a canal, a sluggish waterway flowing down into the Hudson, bringing the city’s garbage along with it. This past summer, about half a nautical mile from that river at what is now 301 Canal Street, a curious little storefront put a collection of contemporary “garbage” on display. Behind a set of perpetually locked double doors, a Chinatown studio–sized space lined with shelves displayed about two dozen designer handbags, each lit from below. Mirrors mounted on either side of the space projected the installation to infinity. Without the telling outer layer of Saran wrap or the blue tarp backdrop, measures that linked the objects to their industrial production and abandoned the theatrics of luxury marketing, it was practically impossible to tell that these bags were fakes.
The front, mounted by the luxury recommerce behemoth The RealReal, behaved as a virtual opposite of Elmgreen & Dragset’s infamously alluring Prada Marfa sculpture (2005): Here, a desert was inserted into one of the richest, most active stretches of Manhattan commerce. The stunt hinged on a particular understanding of authenticity as a designation bestowed on an object according to its provenance, and as an essential quality of designer bags. Of course, this logic is instrumental to the fetishism that upholds the luxury fashion industry, along with the secondhand market and particularly The RealReal, whose primary service depends on the guaranteed authentication of secondhand goods.
Missed in this attempt to instrumentalize Chinatown commerce was the energy on the street—real and relational in a way that this storefront provocation could never compete with. In the end, The RealReal’s fakes were no match for Canal’s bustling sidewalks; the platform’s coy marketing was easily drowned out by the messy social lives of the street’s sly merchandise.