Miami boutique, the Alchemist, on the fifth floor of a supercool car park—yes, there is such a thing—designed by Herzog & de Meuron. (If alchemy was meant to turn dross into gold, the Alchemist succeeds in turning your credit card into fashions with labels like Dries Van Noten and Isabel Marant.)It was December 2008, the depths of the recession, but Roma Cohen (owner) was pretty sure that if he built it, his customer, a person he describes as having a very strong aesthetic but who is not at all trendy, would come. Which is how an 1,800-square-foot transparent box with 22-foot ceilings and walls that are either glass or mirrored (there’s not a bit of drywall in sight) came into being, when the Alchemist at 1111 Lincoln Road opened to the public. (The garage’s other retail options, though scant, are similarly cutting-edge: There’s a Taschen bookstore on the ground floor, a Shake Shack is scheduled to open soon, and that’s about it for the moment.)
At the moment, the shop is dedicated to just three labels—Rodarte, Rick Owens, and Chrome Hearts—but that is subject to radical change. The store is really a blank canvas: you see so much of fashion intertwined with art, with architecture, with furniture. Cohen wanted to have a setting to bring them all together, with no rules.
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