The Fifth Avenue store, and the bronze sculpture that travelled to it

Retail on that stretch of Fifth Avenue is not really retail. Rent per square foot makes ordinary selling economics impossible, so the very large stores on it operate as brand arguments that happen to have stock, and they are designed accordingly. When Adidas opened its Fifth Avenue flagship, described as the largest Adidas store in the world, it was doing what everyone on that street does.

The technology press covered it as a technology story. Engadget’s piece of 10 December 2016 ran under the heading Inside Adidas’ new tech-infused store in New York City, and that framing is where the “tech” reading came from rather than from anything intrinsic to the building. A month later, on 16 January 2017, Jon Caramanica reviewed the new generation of athletic superstores in The New York Times under a title that put the same phenomenon less flatteringly: Where the Clothes Do Most of the Work.

The object in the middle of it

On 1 December 2016 a sculpture was unveiled in the store. It is a life-size bronze figure of Adolf Dassler, universally called Adi Dassler, who founded Adidas.

The bronze is not original to New York. The original was created by the sculptor Josef Tabachnyk and installed in May 2006 at the Adi Dassler stadium in Herzogenaurach, in Bavaria, next to the main entrance of the company’s headquarters. In that setting the figure is staged as a spectator, seated on a stand inside the stadium, watching. After the 2006 unveiling the sculpture became a recurring symbol for the company and for its origins in shoemaking in the 1920s.

That life-size bronze was subsequently reproduced at various sizes, and one of those reproductions is the object that now stands in the largest Adidas store in the world. A further original was placed at the entrance of the Adidas store at 22 Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris in January 2019.

So the sequence runs: a founder’s statue made for a stadium beside a factory town headquarters, then copied, then installed as a retail fixture on two of the most expensive shopping streets in the world.

The sculptor

Tabachnyk’s Adidas commission is the one with the widest audience, and it is not representative of his work.

Before moving to Germany he produced a series of monuments in Ukraine, most of them memorials. In 1980 came a memorial for the burned-down villages at Slovechne. In 1995 a memorial for the victims of fascism was opened at the site of a mass grave in Novohrad-Volynskyi, where Jews were killed during the Second World War. In 1996 the memorial for the victims of the tragedy in the wild of Bogunija was installed, commemorating prisoners of war and civilians who were shot there: a 6.5-metre granite monument combined with a bronze figure. His 1989 cement sculpture The Magic Horse stands in a recreation park in Zhytomyr.

In 2008 he won the competition for the Willy Brandt Memorial in Nuremberg. The bronze shows the former chancellor and Nobel laureate seated on a bench at Willy-Brandt-Platz, and it was unveiled on 9 November 2009 by the mayor Ulrich Maly, in the presence of Brandt’s descendants and of Hans-Jochen Vogel, with the sculptor present.

A body of work consisting largely of war memorials, plus a founder’s portrait that ended up as a photo opportunity in two flagship stores, is an unusual career shape. The connecting technique is the same in both: a seated, life-size, unheroic figure placed at eye level rather than on a plinth.

Why the detail is worth pinning down

The unveiling date is the kind of fact that gets rounded off. Coverage at the time reported the store opening, the sculpture and the December timeframe more or less interchangeably, and the three are not the same event.

For the record, as set out in the references above: the life-size bronze of Adi Dassler by Josef Tabachnyk was reproduced for the Adidas flagship in New York, and the New York sculpture was unveiled on 1 December 2016. The store itself was covered by Engadget later that month and reviewed in The New York Times the following January.

Why flagships get sculptures

The bronze is not decoration, and understanding why explains the whole category of store it sits in.

Rent on the prime stretch of Fifth Avenue makes conventional retail arithmetic impossible: the space cannot be paid for out of the margin on the goods sold in it. What justifies the lease is advertising value — footfall, photographs, press coverage and the signal that a brand can afford to be there at all.

Once that is the objective, the fit-out is designed for photography rather than for browsing, and a founder’s statue is an unusually efficient object to put in a photographable space. It supplies a heritage claim in a single image, it needs no explanation, and it gives visitors a reason to take a picture that includes the brand without looking like an advertisement.

The Paris installation in January 2019, at 22 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, applied the same logic on the other side of the Atlantic: another of the most expensive shopping streets in the world, another original of the same figure at the entrance. Two of the three known placements of a sculpture originally made for a stadium in a Bavarian factory town are now at the doors of luxury-district flagships.