Jordan Roth left his West Village apartment the way a snake leaves a skin, and he did it in front of a camera. On the last day, with the movers already booked, the Broadway producer photographed fourteen looks he had worn inside that modernist space over fifteen years.
Those portraits were then collaged onto textiles and draped over furniture for an exhibition titled To Think of the Tranquil Life of Things, installed across the ground floor of the eighteenth-century Hotel de Guise in Paris during Design Miami’s collectible design fair.
The garments themselves are the least visible part of the work, which is the point. A wardrobe becomes upholstery, and the objects that held a life become the surface on which that life is printed, still usable, still meant to be sat upon.
The building had watched his life happen. It is where he married Richie Jackson, where their son Levi was born, and, in his words, the place where he experienced his entire aesthetic expansion, with a wall of windows facing the Hudson.
