There should be a Hall of Fame for retailers and shops that defined their generations. Design Research, the hugely influential Cambridge, Massachusetts, emporium of modernist furnishings founded in 1953, immediately springs to mind. As does Fiorucci, the Milanese-born specialty store that became an international bastion of progressive taste during the 1970s and ’80s. And then there’s Moss.
Founded in Manhattan in 1994 by the estimable Murray Moss and his life/business partner, Franklin Getchell, Moss revolutionized the concept of selling design. For nearly two decades, the gallery was routinely heralded in the press as the best design shop in America, or even the world. Beyond setting trends and championing talent, Moss made a compelling case for the value of great design—that it has the power to ennoble quotidian objects, that it has meaning, that it deserves respect.
The new tell-all book, Please Do Not Touch
The shop’s saga began in a relatively modest SoHo storefront specializing in what Ab Fab’s Patsy and Edina would describe as “little gorgeous things.” Ettore Sottsass penis vases, Joe Colombo ashtrays, fetishistic soaps shaped like the Venus of Willendorf, and other objets de vertu were arranged in arch groupings behind glass in a pristine, museum-like setting conjured by designer Harry Allen. The product mix hinted at a daring curatorial sensibility, but a more profound statement of purpose was encoded in the display. By presenting teapots and lamps as if they were crown jewels, Moss elevated design to the lofty perch of fine art.
Moss became the site of legendary parties—one featured a saucy young gentleman, fully naked, in a Droog shower—where throngs of revelers would spill out onto Greene Street, Studio 54–style. In 1999 Moss and Getchell expanded the shop into a much larger space, capable of accommodating furniture, adjacent to the original location. There designers on the order of Maarten Baas, Gaetano Pesce , and Hella Jongerius received star treatment in exhibitions of ever-increasing artistry and ambition. As the Moss juggernaut kept rolling, the partners enlarged the operation yet again in 2005 in a newly constructed gallery with a focal wall of pieced wood fragments by Fernando and Humberto Campana .
Alas, the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and in 2012, Moss shuttered its retail operation. But design historians need not lament. The shop’s epic rise and untimely fall has now been chronicled with giddy delight in Please Do Not Touch (Rizzoli), a freewheeling tell-all and design compendium authored by Moss and Getchell. The title is taken from the gallery’s signature admonition to customers, printed on walls throughout the store. It was a typically Mossian ploy, calculated to stoke desire, and oh, how it worked.
