The writer of this article speaks of the "profoundly depressing" aspect of Anthropologie. He gestures to the obvious: the fake vintage, the misplaced nostalgia, the imagined reality.
I think that's a pretty good assessment. But I still feel that there's something else I haven't thought of yet.
June 1, 2006
Critical Shopper
Peter Pan Collars in a Vintage Never-Never Land
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
THE first thing you see when you walk through the doors of Anthropologie's new store on Rockefeller Plaza is a large glass case filled with old bicycle parts.
The bicycle parts — not a whole bicycle, mind you — serve as a kind of sculpture, but they also set the philosophical tone for the store. In fact, they blare it. A rusted bicycle, even an assemblage of pieces that once made up various bicycles, is a symbol of (in no particular order) childhood, innocence, independence, summertime and nostalgia. And the nostalgia smells awfully new in Anthropologie.
Anthropologie, a chain with 82 stores across the country, has taken the sensibility cloyingly referred to as French flea market chic, cleaned it up and made it available to mainstream American shoppers. According to the company literature, the company, founded in 1992, sees its customer as a woman who is 30 to 45; she is "affluent but not materialistic," well educated, well traveled and "relatively fit."
The stores offer a mix of clothing and accessories, bath and body products, home décor, bedding, antique furniture and decorative items some people would refer to as objets, but here I prefer the term tchotchkes. (A candleholder in the shape of tree branches on which painted songbirds perch, at $188, is a tchotchke.) The antique furniture and collectibles, which vary in each store, serve dual purposes as ambience-enhancing props and for-sale inventory.
From an architectural perspective, the store can't miss. Housed in the Art Deco former home of The Associated Press, it occupies one of Rockefeller Center's most thoughtful original buildings, a soaring three-story space defined in this new rendition by wrought-iron railings, enormous crystal chandeliers and a dramatic limestone staircase. At 12,000 square feet of selling space, the Rockefeller Center store is larger than most of those in the chain, which are typically half that size.
The focus of the main floor is women's clothing: inventive, often vintage-inspired pieces by Anna Sui, Tracy Reese, Isabel Marant, James Coviello. Farther back, in what the store literature refers to as the "theater," are home furnishings, which range from crystal drawer pulls and teacups in mind-blowing Mitteleuropa tones of violet and turquoise daubed with gilt all the way up to a $45,000 antique French cabinet.
Downstairs, accessories and a separate sale-only room share space with a spacious, well-lighted honeycomb of dressing rooms. The sales clerks show you to a room, then write your name on the door on a miniature erasable board. I love the dressing rooms, but I have to wonder how long that personalized touch will last.
What strikes me about the store's clothing is its heavy reliance on vintage looks. A knee-length Anna Sui dress in a green-and-black geometric print looks like something Anne Sexton wore on a book jacket in the early 1970's. Grammar-school-style pleated skirts billow out from cotton dresses with Peter Pan collars; they put me in mind of Oscar Levant's famous line that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.
A blue silk dress by Odille is printed with nosegays and encircled with black grosgrain ribbon. It's a look I think of as Aggressively Innocent, and I'm not sure it would work on the New York customers I saw in Anthropologie. At a certain point, you just can't wear Peter Pan collars without looking as if you are trying to reclaim your virginity or are, worst case, a cosmopolitan version of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"
But these are matters of taste. On a practical level, I have only one small criticism. Anthropologie is owned by Urban Outfitters, and it succeeds in distinguishing itself from that parent brand on most levels. But something in my brain clicks when I look at a price tag in Anthropologie, and I recognize that it is the same computerized price-tag system used at Urban Outfitters. Rather than feeling transported to a French flea market, I feel transported to a warehouse selling brightly colored flokati rugs, paper lanterns and cheap T-shirts.
ON a philosophical level, there is something about Anthropologie that is well intentioned but makes me profoundly depressed. The old bicycles, the old-fashioned Marvis toothpaste, the etched-glass candleholders, the calico pajama sets, the teacups and saucers — all are the trappings of a grandparent's or a parent's home.
But the 30-something generation that shops at Anthropologie, among the first to be widely defined as children of divorce, no longer has access to those homes, which have long since been dispersed. There is no longevity in their parents' houses. The romantically weathered chests of drawers and stacks of pristinely aged National Geographic magazines were all put into storage, sold or dispersed among the various interested parties.
This is where Anthropologie steps in: It helps the shopper create the illusion of household continuity by allowing her to reimagine a place where Grandma might leave out her pre-fluoride tooth powder, to simulate a life in which Mom and Dad still live together in a house with European teacups and flocked bedspreads. In a world of Anthropologie furnishings and clothing, the consumers can reclaim lost childhoods, lost marriages, lost virginities. The store's philosophy takes the colloquial and sad world of regrets and realities and wraps it up in a swath of vintage calico, tied with a satin bow.
But the bicycle of the Anthropologie customer's summertime memories has disappeared; it is now in pieces, on untouchable display behind the sealed walls of an enormous glass box.
Anthropologie
50 Rockefeller Center; (212) 246-0386
ATMOSPHERE Reclaimed oak parquet floors, etched mirrors, scented candles.
SERVICE Aims to please.
KEY LOOKS Doris Day meets Carrie Bradshaw.
PRICES American Retro eyelet blouse, $158; 22-karat-gold Sonnet hoop earrings, $248; painted brass robin on a stone perch, $24; milk-and linden-flower-scented Lollia candle, $30.
