Josephine in Paris, France by Ben Kelly and Virgil Abloh

This new Parisian nightclub named after Josephine Baker is a tamer reiteration of a 2017 installation by the same pair of designers, which occupied a former office block by Frederick Gibberd at 180 Strand in London. There, a set of nightclub components familiar from Kelly’s famous Haçienda were jumbled together as if by some tectonic catastrophe: a disco ball lay embedded in a wooden floor, purportedly fallen from the ceiling, and a dance floor curled from the ground like a cresting wave. Titled Ruin, the installation raised a number of questions about the historicity of the club: didn’t many clubs emerge in the first place from the ruins of industrial buildings? Doesn’t clubbing today seem increasingly like a ruin itself? And, is anything useful for communal pleasure left of these fragments, or have they been irretrievably hollowed out as marketing signifiers (like the striped hazard tape that Kelly used to mark the columns of Haçienda’s dance floor, and with which Abloh has more recently adorned his designer trainers)? At Josephine, the designers attempt to coax a more promising answer from these disjecta membra.