Books, ephemera and taste: How fashion shops are also selling culture

The Star

a day ago

To run a buzzy menswear shop in New York these days, it helps to have a few things.
Great clothes, of course. Tasteful decor (Noguchi lanterns and ceramic vessels are de rigueur). Friendly, stylish salespeople certainly don't hurt.
Increasingly, a stack of books is also a must. Preferably of rare and elusive provenance, concerning matters of art and design, and, in many cases, provided by a neatly dressed bespectacled man named Geoff Snack.
'Whenever I put books in a retail store, it's like: How can this help people?' Snack, 40, said one afternoon this spring.
'How can this contribute to the understanding of what this shop is about, what the brands are about?'
He was flipping through a pile of books he had sourced for the clothing store and coffeeshop Colbo on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Stacked on a small table beside a rack of earth-toned clothing were ones featuring Cindy Sherman's shape-shifting photos, an Ellsworth Kelly catalogue and a volume dedicated to the concept of sisterhood.
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'It's like the cafe and music we play,' said Eldar Hadad, one of Colbo's owners, as she sold sugar-dusted morning buns.
'It invites you to linger when you have books – you can skim through and you're welcome to stay, read, have a coffee.'
Lingering, she noted, is a strategy to help encourage sales. It also aligns with a recent retail trend of conjuring an intimate atmosphere, as if customers weren't shopping at a store but rather hanging out at a chic friend's apartment.
Snack's modest literary empire extends to a smattering of popular stores in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, most of which specialise in menswear: J Crew's store on Bond Street, Noah in NoLIta and Ven Space in Carroll Gardens are among them.
In Canada, where he grew up and went to school, he has provided books to pop-up shops by the brand Stone Island and the popular boutique Better Gift Shop.
'I think books and unique items help tell the same stories that inspire our clothing,' said Brendon Babenzien, the men's creative director at J Crew and a founder of Noah.
'Fashion and the choices we make around it are deeply tied to our personal interests, and the items we select reflect those same interests. In that way, they complement each other perfectly.'
Prices for the books range from US$45 to US$600 (approximately RM190 to RM2,537) for a single volume and are often sold to stores on a consignment basis.
Snack calls himself a 'book and paper dealer' because he also traffics in printed ephemera.
A drink ticket from Studio 54, a business card advertising a 1986 pop-up shop by Keith Haring and an artist-designed menu from the shuttered SoHo restaurant Chanterelle are some of the things he has listed on his website, Wrong Answer.
Geoff Snack provides a curated collection of books, preferably of rare and elusive provenance, to fashion boutiques. Photo: The New York Times
'I really love seeing the stuff that I sell out in the world,' Snack said. 'For me, it's really fun to be a part of the visual landscape of the city.'
Peddling books to trendy stores may be a niche gig, but it's not exactly unusual. The fashion and literary worlds have long had a symbiotic relationship, each borrowing liberally from the other.
Booksellers at Left Bank Books, for instance, have supplied art and design volumes to vintage clothing shop Sorbara's in Williamsburg, which also has framed posters from Snack hanging on its walls.
Des Pair Books in Los Angeles has curated books for Frontier, a store in West Hollywood, California, and for clothing brand Buck Mason's outpost in Nashville, Tennessee.
'Books in stores are, essentially, cultural accessories,' said Judith Thurman, a New Yorker writer who has covered fashion for the magazine, which this year introduced merchandise with J Crew.
'They're consumed like that. You would buy a cool necklace and a book with a cool cover.'
Not to mention, the fashion set has long had an interest in what's known as 'world building'.
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Books – especially rare ones concerning highbrow matter, like those Snack sells – can be tools for telegraphing taste or authenticity.
Stores that sell contemporary clothing alongside vintage books and printed ephemera, said W David Marx, the author of Status And Culture: How Our Desire For Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion and Constant Change , are 'kind of associating these new products that you make with this heritage'.
Snack caught the collecting bug as a child in Peterborough, Ontario, where he frequented flea markets with his father, who liked to hunt down Coca-Cola memorabilia.
Snack preferred to forage for video games, hockey trading cards and, later, magazines and punk albums. He recalled cutting out pictures from Wallpaper magazine and hanging them in his bedroom as a teen.
He sought out art and design books in Toronto, where he studied English at the University of Toronto, and visited local book shops whenever he travelled.
At some point he crossed the fine line from casual enthusiast to collector.
'I was never going to own a Warhol,' he said. 'But I could get a Warhol book, or a poster from one of his early shows. It was just getting myself into closer proximity with the culture I love.'
At first he wasn't interested in selling anything from his collection. But a book dealer he met in Boston hatched the idea. 'She said to me: 'Every collector becomes a dealer. It's inevitable,'' he remembered. 'And now that I look back on it, she was totally right.'
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.