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Critical Shopper
Art Is Fashion Is Art Again
Studio art and product design live side by side at Token, a local hangout of sorts on Canal Street.
I’ve been to Token maybe a half dozen times in the last few months. It’s a modest store, jammed in between a tattoo shop and a smoke shop, in a neighborhood that you just … find yourself in.
Dimes, Scarr’s, Metrograph, Kiki’s. Not quite a neighborhood in the Jane Jacobs sense, but the sort of area that New York breeds and then snuffs out. Small cafes, stores with modern shelving, a destination restaurant or two.
One of two things will happen. The vacant storefronts will fill up, rents will skyrocket, the current inhabitants will get forced out; or a plateau followed by an ebb, these few blocks slowly withering back to tumbleweed territory.
For either outcome, Token may be a durable fit. It doesn’t ask for much. It is not a whole lot to look at: some T-shirts (O.K., a lot of T-shirts), a smattering of other clothing, some art and photography books, a rack of surfboards. (Token, the brand, is a surf line.)
But what Token lacks in product mix it makes up for in ideology. We’re in a moment in which the lines between art and fashion — or, I should say, the people who make art and the people who make fashion — is blurrier than ever. People dabble in both, often with little distinction between the two.
That is the new normal: A T-shirt is a zine is a cap is an album is a painting. The medium matters far less than the intent with which the art was made.
Some of the most intriguing items at Token are from artists who dabble in clothing, like Joe Garvey, whose T-shirt designs are sneakily elegiac ($40 to $45) and which I happily snapped up. There are shirts and zines from the outlaw-focused publisher Paper Work, and collaborations with the artist Peter Sutherland and the young curators Katja Horvat and Paige Silveria ($60).
And there is a thoughtful collection of books and zines for sale as well. I particularly enjoyed Rafael Rios’s disarmingly intimate “Family” and “Dog Dance,” a collection of Brad Elterman’s behind-the-scenes pics of late ’70s-early ’80s Los Angeles excess. Also Dizzy, an art magazine and one of my favorite new periodicals of the last couple of years.
Token is part of a passel of worthwhile stores in the area. Patricia Field’s ARTFashion takes the line-blurring remit a little more seriously, stocking artist-made clothes that have been assaulted by paint. Elkel carries men’s clothing with sharp ideological corners. The Hunt is a curio shop set up in an old appliance storefront. And Coming Soon is a smart — and very pastel — modern design and furniture shop.
A couple of storefronts down from Token is Labor, the not-very-breathable skate shop. (I have not been in the Alexander Olch store across the street because I have not yet been cast in a Whit Stillman film.)
That there are so many books and magazines at Token makes sense, because despite the store’s small footprint, it has a kind of magnetism that draws people in and encourages them to stay.
I am not alone in that. Every time I’ve been there, people are lingering. Some were friends of the clerk or the store, some were just customers. But almost everyone found a reason to dawdle.
The last time I visited, a very chill and patient sales clerk fielded a seemingly endless barrage of passers-by. When I walked in, he was planning a skate hang with a friend. Before long, he was pulled away by an older gentleman with a film-director look who was surveying the store’s collection of surfboards because he needed one before the next day.
Next, the sales clerk patiently tolerated — or perhaps politely tuned out — a noob who was trying on a work jacket with high-visibility panels by UPWW, the high-end work wear line, and loudly remarking how it might allow him to walk into a construction site, but also go to a bar, while his friend mused out loud about looking to find the same garment online.
As it happens, on this day, Token was hosting a quasi art show. No, that set-piece performance of the blunders of cross-cultural understanding wasn’t it. Rather, there were some Cali Thornhill DeWitt posters, a surfboard designed in collaboration with the British graffiti brand Gasius, some rowdy Neckface books. Part of the store was essentially shrouded in a canvas tent, with videos projected onto the fabric.
I got to talking with the clerk about art and fashion. Some artists, he said, didn’t, or couldn’t, see themselves working in an accessible space like this.
But what gives Token its quiet energy is that so many of them do, embracing a notion of artistic practice flexible and un-self-conscious enough to allow studio art and product design to live side by side. The lesson is to just make it, and let the output fall where it may.
Token 52 Canal Street, 917-388-3688; tokentokentoken.nyc
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the Popcast. He also writes the men's Critical Shopper column for Styles. He previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. @joncaramanica
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