The Wardrobe: A Collection of Clues

The Wardrobe is not a collection of products. It is a collection of clues.

The idea for The Wardrobe has been around for a long time. Maybe longer than I realized. Turning it into something tangible has simply taken years of work, experimenting, collecting, making and figuring out how to translate something that, for most of my life, has existed primarily inside my head.

Over the past few years I’ve also started to understand that my art isn’t just photography. It isn’t painting. It isn’t clothing, fragrance, collage or objects either.

My art is the world around all of those things.

It comes from dreams. From memories. From the way I’ve seen things since I was a little boy. The places I want to visit, the rooms I want to sit in, the people I want to surround myself with. It comes from what I see, but also from what I hear, touch and smell.

I think I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to explain that world to people.

The physical things I make and collect have become my translation tools.

A photograph can communicate one part of it. A garment can communicate another. A fragrance can describe something that neither of them can. An old silver serving piece, an ashtray, a book, a ceramic bowl or a piece of someone else’s artwork can somehow explain another small corner.

Individually, they are things.

Together, they begin to build a world.

The Wardrobe is where those things finally get to live together.

Inside The Wardrobe

There will be clothing from several different origins, but I don’t necessarily see them as separate entities.

Some pieces will simply be vintage garments that I’ve found and loved exactly as they are.

Others will pass through the amadeo amadeo studio and be reinterpreted.

That reinterpretation can be very small. An incredible jacket might have a broken button that interrupts the story I see for it, so I’ll find vintage buttons that feel more appropriate. Another piece might need embellishment. Something else might need things taken away rather than added. Proportions can change. Garments can be reconstructed, dyed, repaired or completely reconsidered.

Sometimes a piece only needs the smallest adjustment to pull it slightly inward toward the amadeo amadeo world.

Those garments will have marker tags inside identifying that they have been altered by the amadeo amadeo studio.

Then there are pieces from The Collections themselves—garments conceived and made as amadeo amadeo from the beginning, carrying their own labels and their own histories.

I like having all three coexist.

Something new beside something old. Something untouched beside something manipulated.

I don’t want to erase the age from vintage clothing. Quite the opposite.

The natural distressing, fading, wear and imperfections are often what attracted me to a garment in the first place. They show that the piece has already had a life. That is its soul.

Luxury, to me, has never meant keeping something pristine forever.

I like the idea of owning beautiful things and actually living with them until they begin to carry evidence of you too.

The Cabinet of Art & Objects

Within The Wardrobe will also be The Cabinet of Art & Objects.

This might be the part that explains my brain most clearly.

There are objects I have collected for years that are ready to be dusted off and given another life. Things I found somewhere and immediately felt connected to. Things from my own past. Heirloom pieces. Artwork. Strange little objects that made me feel like they already belonged to the world I had been dreaming about.

Why keep all of them to myself?

The Cabinet will hold antique serving pieces, catchalls, ashtrays, objects designed to hide other objects, books, incense, photography, collages, ceramics, my own artwork and work from other creatives.

And whatever else wanders in.

I want it to have the feeling of looking through someone’s home rather than browsing a perfectly categorized department.

You discover something.

You pick it up.

You wonder where it came from.

Maybe you take it home and it begins another life.

Shopping a World

I don’t necessarily see The Wardrobe as a rejection of traditional retail.

I see it as an investment in what I believe the future of retail can be.

I want shopping to become experiential again.

Instead of simply buying a thing, you can enter a lifestyle. You can experience it for a while, decide which parts resonate with you and find different ways of carrying a piece of that world home.

The Wardrobe online is the beginning of that.

Eventually, I want you to physically walk into it.

I want a brick-and-mortar amadeo amadeo showroom where you can touch the clothes, try them on, pick up the objects, smell the fragrances, look through the books, sit down and stay for a while.

Online, I can give you the image.

Eventually, I want to give you the texture.

The smell.

The sound.

The entire room.

The world itself is difficult to describe because it is built from contradictions.

It is domestic meeting futurism.

It is unapologetically stylish.

It smells like classic fragrance and stale cigarettes.

There is sharp tailoring, but somebody has already lived in it.

There is early Hollywood glamour imagined through the eyes of someone far away from Hollywood.

Beautiful things aren't protected from living. Luxury objects are used until they're falling apart.

Old things meet new ideas.

Polish meets decay.

Sentimentality meets experimentation.

Past and future exist in the same room.

For years I thought this was the world I wished I could live in.

At some point I realized I had been living in it the entire time.

I just needed to build the walls around it.

The Future Showroom

The dream is eventually to open an amadeo amadeo showroom on the East Coast and, as that world grows, another on the West Coast.

But I don’t want it to become the kind of store you visit because, I need to buy a shirt today.

I want someone to tell a friend:

You need to go see this place.

Maybe you come in and buy a jacket.

Maybe you leave with an ashtray.

Maybe a fragrance reminds you of someone.

Maybe you find a painting.

Maybe you sit there for twenty minutes and leave with nothing other than an idea.

That counts too.

Because ultimately The Wardrobe is not about filling a closet.

It is about offering an entrance.

Every garment, scent, photograph, painting, book, antique and object is another piece of the puzzle. Another clue. Another translation of something I have seen, imagined, remembered or dreamed.

And slowly, as all of those pieces come together, perhaps the world I have been trying to describe all these years becomes something you can see too.

Welcome to The Wardrobe.