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flaunt the imperfection
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ny times...
HABITATS
A Fashion Foursome's Silver Cage
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: December 26, 2004
ACK then, there were buttons, chicken bones and worse on the floor. Fluorescent lights hung like train cars at shoulder height from the ceiling, and boards and bars were on all the windows. As the two young men, Gabi and Kai, and the two young women, Ange and Adi - otherwise known as the fashion collective As Four - hacked their way through the debris in the long-abandoned fourth-floor loft on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side they would use as their workroom and then also as their home, its sweatshop history clung to it like rank breath.
When the magazines called, they would clean up in the one-bedroom they shared in a tenement on Stanton Street a few blocks away and race uptown for appointments. It was just before the millennium, and the group's indie star was rising. At the invitation of Kim Hastreiter, the co-editor of Paper Magazine, the indie fashion bible, the four had staged a show in Bryant Park using hula dolls, hundreds of them, all dressed in tiny As Four clothes and spinning to Wagner. The edgier fashion press was beside itself.
In three months - and one-and-a-half Dumpsters - the loft was empty. They painted it silver from floor to ceiling. (A problem, they say, since it invited comparisons to Andy Warhol's Factory, an unlooked-for reference.) Bjork, the elfin Icelandic pop star, wore their futuristic fashions, and well-known fashion houses knocked off their platter-sized disc bag.
Editors from Tokyo, Milan and New York rode the tiny elevator - driven still by an elderly Chinese-American man, though there is hardly room for a passenger - to the "Silver Cage," as they called it, where there were disco balls and funhouse mirrors, and where silver sequins and pearl beads crawled up a column as if they were mold blooming on a summer-house wall.
They had built a plywood box big enough for two queen-size mattresses, painted it silver and raised it on stilts. They'd sleep like spoons there each night, nudged into corners by Powder, their adoring white Staffordshire/boxer/pit bull mix, and their four cats. The fashion crowd went buzz-buzz.
"People would fantasize about us," Ange said the other day, dreamlike in a sequined kimono, her eyes like moonbeams behind huge Lucite-framed glasses.
"But it was like kids at camp," Adi said. "And it was great for the moment. But it couldn't last."
It was now a week and a day before Christmas Eve, and the four drank their iced-coffee breakfasts and talked about the fate of their company and their friendship, and the uniqueness of both. The Silver Cage is still As Four's workroom and showroom - the spring collection hung like satin and silk charmeuse ghosts in front of the funhouse mirrors, in colors like café au lait and raspberry - but only Gabi and Ange live there now. Adi and Kai moved out a year ago, an act that still rankles, still confuses.
Everyone spoke at once - a not-so-United Nation. The lilt and pitch of their dissent was distinctly European in flavor and tenor. No American could debate so intensely without shouting. Still, a reporter struggled to hear each voice.
"You can see it is hard right now to be As Four," sighed Adi, who at 30 is the youngest.
"You can see that we are in the middle of our 'Seven Year Itch,' " said Gabi, who is 39 and sat in a silver wheelchair. A Palestinian born in Lebanon, Gabi has an arresting, ancient profile. It was flecked with glitter the other day, remnants of their Christmas Party the night before, he said.
As Four began with two best friends, Adi and Ange, at fashion school in Germany. Adi was from Israel; Ange, now 33, from Tajikistan. They moved to New York in the early 1990's, worked the door at a nightclub called Flamenco East, and "played fashion," as Ange described it, styling models in their Ziggie Stardust way to build a portfolio.
At Paper Magazine, whose pages they began to style, they were called the Upside Down Girls, for their gravity-defying hair and upside down/inside out clothes. Kai, now 32, was a young model from Germany, and he took the photos. Gabi was married and working in mainstream fashion - for DKNY, Marc Jacobs, Kate Spade - when the four careered into one another one day on Houston Street.
"Like a bomb, an explosion," said Kai, waving elegant fingers.
HABITATS
A Fashion Foursome's Silver Cage
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: December 26, 2004
ACK then, there were buttons, chicken bones and worse on the floor. Fluorescent lights hung like train cars at shoulder height from the ceiling, and boards and bars were on all the windows. As the two young men, Gabi and Kai, and the two young women, Ange and Adi - otherwise known as the fashion collective As Four - hacked their way through the debris in the long-abandoned fourth-floor loft on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side they would use as their workroom and then also as their home, its sweatshop history clung to it like rank breath.
When the magazines called, they would clean up in the one-bedroom they shared in a tenement on Stanton Street a few blocks away and race uptown for appointments. It was just before the millennium, and the group's indie star was rising. At the invitation of Kim Hastreiter, the co-editor of Paper Magazine, the indie fashion bible, the four had staged a show in Bryant Park using hula dolls, hundreds of them, all dressed in tiny As Four clothes and spinning to Wagner. The edgier fashion press was beside itself.
In three months - and one-and-a-half Dumpsters - the loft was empty. They painted it silver from floor to ceiling. (A problem, they say, since it invited comparisons to Andy Warhol's Factory, an unlooked-for reference.) Bjork, the elfin Icelandic pop star, wore their futuristic fashions, and well-known fashion houses knocked off their platter-sized disc bag.
Editors from Tokyo, Milan and New York rode the tiny elevator - driven still by an elderly Chinese-American man, though there is hardly room for a passenger - to the "Silver Cage," as they called it, where there were disco balls and funhouse mirrors, and where silver sequins and pearl beads crawled up a column as if they were mold blooming on a summer-house wall.
They had built a plywood box big enough for two queen-size mattresses, painted it silver and raised it on stilts. They'd sleep like spoons there each night, nudged into corners by Powder, their adoring white Staffordshire/boxer/pit bull mix, and their four cats. The fashion crowd went buzz-buzz.
"People would fantasize about us," Ange said the other day, dreamlike in a sequined kimono, her eyes like moonbeams behind huge Lucite-framed glasses.
"But it was like kids at camp," Adi said. "And it was great for the moment. But it couldn't last."
It was now a week and a day before Christmas Eve, and the four drank their iced-coffee breakfasts and talked about the fate of their company and their friendship, and the uniqueness of both. The Silver Cage is still As Four's workroom and showroom - the spring collection hung like satin and silk charmeuse ghosts in front of the funhouse mirrors, in colors like café au lait and raspberry - but only Gabi and Ange live there now. Adi and Kai moved out a year ago, an act that still rankles, still confuses.
Everyone spoke at once - a not-so-United Nation. The lilt and pitch of their dissent was distinctly European in flavor and tenor. No American could debate so intensely without shouting. Still, a reporter struggled to hear each voice.
"You can see it is hard right now to be As Four," sighed Adi, who at 30 is the youngest.
"You can see that we are in the middle of our 'Seven Year Itch,' " said Gabi, who is 39 and sat in a silver wheelchair. A Palestinian born in Lebanon, Gabi has an arresting, ancient profile. It was flecked with glitter the other day, remnants of their Christmas Party the night before, he said.
As Four began with two best friends, Adi and Ange, at fashion school in Germany. Adi was from Israel; Ange, now 33, from Tajikistan. They moved to New York in the early 1990's, worked the door at a nightclub called Flamenco East, and "played fashion," as Ange described it, styling models in their Ziggie Stardust way to build a portfolio.
At Paper Magazine, whose pages they began to style, they were called the Upside Down Girls, for their gravity-defying hair and upside down/inside out clothes. Kai, now 32, was a young model from Germany, and he took the photos. Gabi was married and working in mainstream fashion - for DKNY, Marc Jacobs, Kate Spade - when the four careered into one another one day on Houston Street.
"Like a bomb, an explosion," said Kai, waving elegant fingers.
