Painterly Vivienne Westwood corsets, Yohji Yamamoto caps, glittering Noir Kei Ninomiya clothes, and bulbous Comme des Garçons creations. These ultimate seems to be from the labels’ notoriously intriguing runway reveals in Paris are just some of the stuff you may discover at Kasuri—a boutique in Hudson, New York celebrating 10 years of enterprise in 2024.
Layla Kalin, who initially helmed her personal small trend label open for one-off commissions, based the boutiques in 2014 alongside Jonathan Osofsky, then a current graduate of the Division of Arts at Bard School. The 2 shared a love for all issues avant-garde and Japanese trend, and when their paths crossed, the remainder was historical past.
“Hudson was, at the moment, very completely different than it’s now, however there was simply a number of attention-grabbing folks and plenty of artists and plenty of vintage shops and plenty of design,” Osofsky tells Vogue by cellphone from his Hudson outpost. “I had at all times type of fantasized about having a boutique that was one thing excess of a boutique.” Osofsky and Kalin had been impressed by Comme des Garçons’ authentic guerilla fashion pop-ups from the early 2000s, which took over uncooked city areas in sudden, non-fashion centric cities like Helsinki, Istanbul, and Reykjavik. Additionally: avant garde boutiques in London within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, like Granny Takes a Journey and all of Vivienne Westwood’s incarnations on Kings Street. “That was my type of preliminary fantasy; the shop could be in a most unlikely neighborhood.”
Stepping by way of the doorways of Kasuri may shock the typical vacationer visiting Hudson, but additionally encourage the enclave or well-to-do artists within the space. Positioned not simply as a retailer, however as a neighborhood assembly hub, the store has hosted all the things from small gallery openings to film nights that concentrate on esoteric aesthetic movies. “I used to be given the chance to manifest, awkwardly at first, the type of boutique that I at all times needed to be a part of in this sort of lineage of boutiques that had been clearly shops that bought garments, but additionally had been type of a gathering place or a spot that type of created and fostered some type of neighborhood,” provides Osofsky. Amidst a uncooked, industrial area with excessive ceilings, the purpose of all of it extends past trend. “It’s a boutique, a neighborhood and a political undertaking,” says Osofsky, who has held fundraisers and for varied social and international points in Kasuri.
However maybe the most important fantasy of all is the truth that the boutique one of many only a few places on this planet the place you may view, and buy the extravagantly eccentric runway seems to be from Comme des Garçons and Noir Kei Ninomiya (the eclectic designers beneath the CDG label). Suppose: a berry coloured cascade of fake flowers that fully envelop the wearer from head to toe, look quantity 4 from Noir Kei Ninomiya’s fall 2023 assortment. Or an enormous orb of flowery-black and white cloth with sleeves trailing to the bottom, look quantity 6 from Comme des Garçons spring 2023. Each of those items have come by way of the doorways of Kasuri. It’s a part of the rationale the store has attracted trend world collectors together with Michelle Elie or the regionally based mostly conceptual artist Marina Abramović. The fashion icon and former membership child Patrick McDonald labored on the boutique in recent times; Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck has visited. The primary time Osofsky encountered Elie was over the cellphone, when she was on the lookout for a selected runway gown that wasn’t bought wherever else—not even within the Comme des Garçons or Dover Road Market flagships within the metropolis. “I simply obtained this name in the future from this lady, and we should’ve been on the cellphone for 2 or three hours,” he says. “We simply had found one another by way of this gown and simply had such an incredible, lovely, highly effective, good dialog about Rei, specifically.”
