Humble Abode

There is no trash can on the southeast corner of Hester and Ludlow Streets, but you will find plenty of refuse. Bode, the luxury clothing brand—in partnership with Green River Project, the luxury interior designer of its One-Of-A-Kind Shoppe at 54 Hester—has filled its store windows with garbage. There are piles of loose feathers and cotton batting and rolls of crumpled, yellowed lace; there are cardboard tubes and bolts of worn fabric slouching dejectedly against a tongue-and-groove wall. There’s a vintage poster announcing a sale of children’s hand-me-downs. There are dozens of boxes of buttons from a recently shuttered factory in Iowa, once the largest button producer in the world. Somewhere there’s a copy of Georges Bataille’s collection of essays Visions of Excess (1985). On a chunk of upholstery foam near the center of one window there is, inexplicably, a single dark pube.

The brainchild of Atlanta-born designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla, Bode emerged during the Trump administration from a crop of designers and labels (Raf Simons at Calvin Klein, the artist Sterling Ruby, surfer brand Stan) making nostalgic references to Americana and traditional craft. The clothes—often bespoke workwear made from virtuously “upcycled” tablecloths, grain sacks, and patchwork quilts and decorated with spangles and intricate embroidery—appear both expensive and homespun. “Everything here is very … intentional,” a worker tells me before we are interrupted by the trill of an old-fashioned landline sounding from an iPhone nearby. The stores are decorated with items from Bode Aujla’s unwieldy personal hoard of vintage display cases, department store fixtures, and other furnishings (plus one million of those Iowa buttons) which are stashed across tony personal residences in the West Village and rural Connecticut, a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Brooklyn, a Dimes Square loft-turned-tailoring studio, and the entire eleventh floor of the newly redeveloped 161 Water Street, the former home of AIG.

In 2019, Bode opened its flagship store at 58 Hester Street, below a federally subsidized low-income apartment building and next to the longstanding New Red Star laundromat. (The landlord they all share, the Chinatown Preservation Housing Development Fund Company—connected to Asian Americans for Equality, rumored Maoists turned nonprofit developers—acquired the building in 2007 during a raft of local initiatives to rebuild Chinatown following the attacks on the World Trade Center.) At the height of the pandemic, when Classic Coffee Shop at 56 Hester shut its doors after forty years, Bode moved in and set up a café serving cardamom-spiced Folgers. (The address is now a Bode Shoe Shoppe that looks and feels like an empty Elks Lodge.) Later, when Stanley’s Pharmacy (itself a retro-inspired, gentrifying enterprise) closed following the untimely death of its owner, Bode expanded its footprint all the way to the corner lot. Last fall, it opened its first women’s store on the ground floor of a condominium at 79 Worth Street. For months the cursive signs in the transom windows (“Eveningwear,” “Bridal,” and “Fine Tailoring”) have been partially covered by scaffolds. There is construction everywhere in this patch of Tribeca—it’s hard to forget the neighborhood is the outcrop of a modern ruin.

The visual world of Bode traces the boom and bust of American downtowns. The brand’s first collection at Paris Fashion Week was inspired by an old Bode family business: supplying the circus wagons seen in the parades spanning the Main Streets of new frontier settlements. Fast forward to the eyesore windows at Bode’s One-Of-A-Kind Shoppe, which call to mind those in Stephen Shore’s 1977 photographs of the desolate downtowns in Campbell, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after the flight of industry and capital. There is an air of misery, a threat of disaster, economic or otherwise. The same holds for the tumbledown façades of the trendy Bayard Street establishments Dr. Clark and The River, both from Green River Project’s design portfolio. (The studio, which touts a “research-based approach to building furniture and interiors,” is co-owned by Emily Adams Bode Aujla’s husband, Aaron Aujla.)

As visual merchandising, these artificial ruins perform a spectacular sleight of hand, coyly disavowing the exclusive retail and hospitality spaces within while thumbing their nose at the ongoing processes of blight and uneven development plaguing vast swaths of the United States. At their most cynical, they exemplify what urban planners refer to as “retaining neighborhood character.” Ironically enough, Bode’s faux-abandoned windows are not entirely out of place in the actually emptying commercial landscape of New York City. According to a recent proposal by the Adams administration supporting the mayor’s “City of Yes” agenda, 17 percent of storefronts in Manhattan’s Community Board 3—encompassing the East Village, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side—lie vacant.

Pastiche of urban decay, evoking the lumpen and their declining fortunes, is nothing new. In Bode’s studied shabbiness are hints of designers who have used detritus: John Galliano’s infamous collection for Dior, inspired by the homeless of Paris, or Martin Margiela’s shirts of plastic trash, first shown in a rundown Paris suburb. In New York, it echoes the hidden entrance of Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons store, which opened in 1999 at the unassuming site of an old auto body shop as the first luxury retailer in Chelsea, or the artificially rusted Bodega Truck, which currently sells chopped cheese sandwiches to NYU students beneath a fake sign for food stamps.

As buyouts and private equity suck wealth and industry out of small-town America, there goes Bode picking through the remains: quilts, buttons, coffee, garbage, workers, and all. “I like it,” an employee, seated before a giant, soiled paper moon, said of the Shoppe’s decor. “I’m from Oklahoma, and it looks just like this.”