PHILLIP LIM'S NEW FLAGSHIP
In collaboration with the award-winning, London-based retail design agency Campaign, 3.1 Phillip Lim has unveiled a brand-new New York City flagship boutique to house the designer’s entire women’s, men’s, and accessories collections.
Located on 48 Great Jones Street in the NoHo district of Manhattan, the newly developed retail concept store, which opened last week with a stunning performance by Banks, defines pragmatic luxury. An extension of Lim’s own design studio, the space is both contemporary and classic, featuring unexpected materials, layered geometric forms, and vintage furniture personally chosen by the designer himself.
“In my studio, I am offered a space where temporal ideas become realized and daydreams are romanced into reality—this is luxury,” Lim explains. He says he wanted to share this dynamic and romantic environment with his clientele, offering a more personal and creative approach to the retail experience.
Lim specifically chose Great Jones Street as the location for his new flagship simply because he loved the neighborhood. “It is one of the few places in New York that really forces you to slow down the pace. The streets are wider and tree-lined, and it feels like a locale—there is a real neighborhood feel about it. I wanted to take the idea of shopping back to feeling luxurious—not somewhere where the experience is rushed, so the location on Great Jones was designed to evoke this feeling,” he explains.
The collections are carefully arranged so that special attention is given to each item and no piece goes unnoticed. Concrete floors with interspersed marble tiles framed by brass inlays offer a stunningly effective minimalist foundation. Walls are lined with artist studio canvases and whitewashed plywood to give an aura of dynamic ideas constantly in motion. Mixed material plinths are intermittently dispersed to display selected works in study. There is a museum-like quality to the space, with large stone steps juxtaposed against a white curved plywood wall, highlighting specific pieces.
Lim also collaborated with renowned photographer Bill Jacobson to document the creation of the store over a span of three months. Jacobson, whose works explore the concept of memory and its connection to physical and emotional spaces, has been featured at the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, amongst various other museum collections. Jacobson and Lim edited the photos in a limited-edition hardcover book exclusively sold at the Great Jones Street location.
Lim says he wanted the book to be a documentation of a moment of reflection, explaining, “The process of building the store happens so quickly that you don’t really get a chance to enjoy the beauty of it. Capturing those moments that will never be on view to the public was really interesting to me. Having Bill agree to work on the images was a real honor—his approach is very much in line with the type of story I wanted to tell.”
3.1 Phillip Lim is now open at 48 Great Jones Street, New York.
Alexandra Sarabia is a freelance writer and currently a graduate student studying international journalism at City University London.
