Painterly Vivienne Westwood corsets, Yohji Yamamoto caps, glittering Noir Kei Ninomiya dresses, and bulbous Comme des Garçons creations. These final looks from the labels’ notoriously intriguing runway shows in Paris are just a few of the things you might find at Kasuri—a boutique in Hudson, New York celebrating 10 years of business in 2024.
Layla Kalin, who originally helmed her own small fashion label open for one-off commissions, founded the boutiques in 2014 alongside Jonathan Osofsky, then a recent graduate of the Division of Arts at Bard College. The two shared a love for all things avant-garde and Japanese fashion, and when their paths crossed, the rest was history.
“Hudson was, at that time, very different than it is now, but there was just lots of interesting people and lots of artists and lots of antique stores and lots of design,” Osofsky tells Vogue by phone from his Hudson outpost. “I had always kind of fantasized about having a boutique that was something far more than a boutique.” Osofsky and Kalin were inspired by Comme des Garçons’ original guerilla style pop-ups from the early 2000s, which took over raw urban spaces in unexpected, non-fashion centric cities like Helsinki, Istanbul, and Reykjavik. Also: avant garde boutiques in London in the 1960s and 1970s, like Granny Takes a Trip and all of Vivienne Westwood's incarnations on Kings Road. “That was my kind of initial fantasy; the store would be in a very unlikely neighborhood.”
Stepping through the doors of Kasuri might shock the average tourist visiting Hudson, but also inspire the enclave or well-to-do artists in the area. Positioned not just as a store, but as a community meeting hub, the shop has hosted everything from small gallery openings to movie nights that focus on esoteric aesthetic films. “I was given the opportunity to manifest, awkwardly at first, the kind of boutique that I always wanted to be part of in this kind of lineage of boutiques that were obviously stores that sold clothes, but also were kind of a meeting place or a place that kind of created and fostered some sort of community,” adds Osofsky. Amidst a raw, industrial space with high ceilings, the point of it all extends beyond fashion. “It’s a boutique, a community and a political project,” says Osofsky, who has held fundraisers and for various social and global issues in Kasuri.
But perhaps the biggest fantasy of all is the fact that the boutique one of the very few locations in the world where you can view, and purchase the extravagantly eccentric runway looks from Comme des Garçons and Noir Kei Ninomiya (the eclectic designers under the CDG label). Think: a berry colored cascade of faux flowers that completely envelop the wearer from head to toe, look number four from Noir Kei Ninomiya’s fall 2023 collection. Or a massive orb of flowery-black and white fabric with sleeves trailing to the ground, look number 6 from Comme des Garçons spring 2023. Both of these pieces have come through the doors of Kasuri. It’s part of the reason the shop has attracted fashion world collectors including Michelle Elie or the locally based conceptual artist Marina Abramović. The style icon and former club kid Patrick McDonald worked at the boutique in recent years; Belgian fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck has visited. The first time Osofsky encountered Elie was over the phone, when she was looking for a particular runway dress that wasn’t sold anywhere else—not even in the Comme des Garçons or Dover Street Market flagships in the city. “I just received this call one day from this woman, and we must've been on the phone for two or three hours,” he says. “We just had discovered each other through this dress and just had such an amazing, beautiful, powerful, brilliant conversation about Rei, in particular.”
Up next, Osofsky is planning potential pop-ups in Hudson and more community events with a focus on high fashion that’s hard to find anywhere else. “Our boutique is kind of supported by a lot of brilliant weirdos; a constellation of fashion weirdos,” he says. “I think we've been really lucky that they see us and what we're doing and allow us to share those kinds of pieces as well.”