Skim City

Rafael de Cárdenas decided to become an architect after reading about a building described as “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” Fitting, then, that Kimberly Noel Kardashian, notoriously eager for the same comparison, tapped him to design Skims’s New York flagship, which opened in December. (You’ve seen the pics: Kim riding that mobility scooter.) It was critic Herbert Muschamp, writing in 1999, who drew the Marilyn parallel to the Guggenheim Bilbao, finding both actress and building intuitive and exhibitionist. The interior of the 647 Fifth Avenue revamp by de Cárdenas, however, evokes the uptown Guggenheim more than Bilbao thanks to its plaster-finished spiral staircase—a defining presence, second only to Vanessa Beecroft’s fifteen-foot-tall female nude statue, which grabs shoppers’ attention as they enter. Beecroft’s performances, including the career-defining Show (1998), which assembled bikini-clad models at the base of the Guggenheim’s rotunda, are embedded in the DNA of a retail store striving to resemble a high temple of art. While that museum’s trademark…