Off the Web and Into TriBeCa,2014

Off the Web and Into TriBeCa
The New york time

OF ALL THE MANY pockets of fresh new money in New York, TriBeCa must be the freshest, the cleanest, the most insulated from the world’s horrors — even those enshrined in immediate proximity. “It’s a microclimate,” said an esteemed author I met at the still-chugging Odeon the other night, feeling very “Bright Lights, Big City” (though we were not sneaking off to do lines of blow in the bathroom but nursing tame little glasses of sauvignon blanc at our table).

There are the hairless, tan banker man-hulks, jogging in or out of Flywheel, the indoor cycling studio. There are the bedding — pardon me, “high-performance sleep system” — stores with mattresses the size of small yachts. And now there is La Garçonne: the physical manifestation of an almost decade-old clothing website for Francophile minimalists whose budgets and sartorial daring have graduated from Agnès b. and A.P.C. to more-obscure brands like Vetements and A Détacher.

Online records show that on the eve of 2009, with the economy reeling like the Robert Downey Jr. character in “Less Than Zero,” I ordered a pair of Dickensian gray wool mittens by Ligne 6 Martin Margiela from the site. They weren’t cheap, even at 70 percent off, and were soon consumed by moths.

Maybe it was bourgeois of me then to consign them to the textile-recycling heap? For under bare light bulbs and bobbing Noguchi-style lanterns, the new store proudly showcases garments in various stages of intentional deterioration and distress, like a cream-colored pullover designed by Tsumori Chisato, which was peppered with jagged holes ($425).

I can see how, if worn confidently by a particular sort of woman, this sweater may serve as comment on the ravages of our age (with a commensurate check to Doctors Without Borders, one might hope). But it would transform another sort of woman, a.k.a. me, into an ambulatory cat-scratching post.

“Watch me unravel,” Weezer sang in “Undone” 20 years ago. “I’ll soon be naked, lying on the floor.”

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