Unruly Objects

In December 2015, two months after American Apparel filed for bankruptcy, the clothing retailer announced the closure of its flagship store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The store, which had then been in operation for 12 years, was one of the earliest casualties of a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate the struggling company. By early 2017, American Apparel would close all of its remaining physical locations across the United States. Just over two years after its closure, a segment of the Sunset Boulevard building re-emerged in Wellington. For four weeks in April this year, a replica of the shop’s doors stood, bolted to the floor, in Hopkinson Mossman’s new Wellington gallery, as part of Fiona Connor’s show Closed Down Clubs & Monochromes.

The doors are fairly unassuming. Nothing about them, beyond their title, makes clear their provenance. Black aluminium, glass panes, a single A4 sheet, signalling the store’s closure, a business card for a company called JG Publicity cheekily lodged between the glass and the metal, and layers upon layers of dried dirt, locating the doors in a setting heavily populated by bodies and the traces they leave behind. The American Apparel doors are something of an anomaly in the show. They belong to a globally recognisable brand, the demise of which is attributable as much to an abundance of cheap, disposable fashion as to the odious behaviour of its founder, Dov Charney. The doors’ sparsity, even the economy of the store’s closure announcement, conjures the promise of an entire lifestyle: a simple, cool, Californian way of life, which, it turns out, proved impossible to sustain.

Connor’s definition of a ‘club’ is an expansive one, and here includes a French restaurant in Chicago, as well as a jazz club in LA. These are spaces where people with a common interest,