THE POSH AND THE PERVERSE /MAXFIELD

A better version of this piece previously appeared on Sept. 23, 2009 in the New York Times.

THERE are destination stores that you must make pilgrimages to just for your edification. You go for the same reason you go to great little museums or unique homes: to bask in an expansive articulation of a particular style, a unified curatorial vision.

The goods at Maxfield in Los Angeles represent decades of a rare and decadent taste allowed to ferment, boil over and roll out as far and wide as its whims demand. Just stumbling around inside the store is a master class in aesthetic sophistication, and this is why you go, because unless you’re an Olsen twin, the price tags are open-palmed blows to the face.

Tommy Perse, the father of James Perse (of expensive T-shirt fame), is legendary for being the first Los Angeles retailer to embrace the color black, and cutting-edge looks from Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, back in the earliest 1980s.

Among Maxfield’s offerings are pre-owned luxury goods  collected, I learned, via Perse acquaintances with old European families. Vintage medical vitrines are full of old Rolexes and Cartier baubles; tall glass cases are packed with old Hermès desk sets, thermoses, bottle openers, horse brushes and other instruments of aristocratic equipage. A moth-eaten Gucci suitcase made of genuine zebra hide will set you back $21,500 ... but it screams old money.

The brands are a fusion of poshness and punk. I lusted over a rack of LGB (Le Grand Bleu), a brand that expresses a fiction of the American West retold through a Japanese fashion sensibility: long, skinny, distressed plaid cowboy shirts, with zippers  something Sam Shepard would be wearing after being dragged for a couple of miles behind a 1959 Chevy Apache.

A rack of Balmain brings a mind-bending new unattainability to your wardrobe with tumescent shoulder pads (a motorcycle jacket, $8,915) and motocross-style jeans weighing in at an unforgivable $2,915. For jeans! Made of denim! No Kevlar, no sheared ibex, no major electronic, automotive or weapons capabilities whatsoever. Just motorcycle pants that cost a full 300 percent more than my last motorcycle. But if you are so aggressively well-off that you’re willing to drop the equivalent of a schoolteacher’s monthly salary on your day look, then you’re probably married to someone like Scarface or Hank Paulson ... and that’s how you roll.

I know that when shopping for clothing, I’m just not happy unless the décor involves taxidermy chickens dressed in Edwardian formalwear. Maxfield is good enough to provide these, alongside an impressive collection of first-edition out-of-print art books; some stunning examples of vintage modern furniture (a compulsion so addictive that Maxfield recently opened a furniture annex across the street); and two other elements that have come to symbolize the mark of true sophistication for me: sex toys and human remains.

The Erotica case, discreetly placed at the back of the store, holds scrimshaw and quartz crystal phalluses, silver slave collars, real horsetail whips and $3,950 handcuffs designed by the scholar, author and bondage enthusiast Betony Vernon. Want an A in His Class? You Had Better Go Viral.

I have always wanted to see a real shrunken head. At Maxfield, you can buy one for a mere $37,500. Also a Dayak human trophy skull, whose tag describes him as having a “very well handled patina,” and perhaps the most truly frightening objet d’art I’ve ever seen: another human skull with huge ram horns knotted onto it with rattan and decorated with a knot of shredded floral fabric that strongly suggests the someone’s bird-watching aunt toddled too far into the heart of darkness ($39,000).

I beseeched Jahil Fisher to dress me, on the merits of his slick pompadour, tiny black blazer and untied shoes. The first outfit: Balmain motorcycle pants (O.K., I requested them), a long tank by LGB ($185) and a reversible plaid shirt by Serenade ($1,275)  an outfit remarkably similar to ones I liberated from trash bins as a punky teenager.

A distressed-leather biker vest by Agatha, Mr. Fisher agreed, was definitely something Cher would have worn in “Mask.” I agreed that a certain clingy black dress with mesh detail by L’Wren Scott was “sex personified” ($2,310).

The soundtrack, ironically, was the ABC song “How to Be a Millionaire”: “I’ve seen the future/I can’t afford it.”

In the 1930s, the majority of Germans were already put off by modern art  atonal music, Cubism, Surrealism, jazz, etc.  when the Nazis deemed it entartete kunst, or degenerate art. Culture itself became a weapon of propaganda, and the idea that modern art was immoral and elitist was ascribed to its being an expression of the depraved nature of Bolshevik Jews. Spinning mainstream discomfort with avant-garde art into anti-Semitic sentiment helped the Nazis regulate culture; by 1939, Kafka was banned from bookstores, and “degenerate” works were confiscated from museums and replaced by wholesome works extolling the virtues of obedience, militarism and racial purity.

The avant-garde, in its original sense, was meant to push cultural boundaries, and oppose market forces dictated by the mainstream culture. Nowadays, sales figures have replaced all other metrics for determining artistic merit and success.

Tommy Perse will never move anywhere near the volume of merchandise as his son, the T-shirt baron. But quality, not quantity, is the goal. The intelligence and energy of Maxfield is evident in every object selected to represent its thrillingly chic, grown-up sensibility. The inventory is in itself a high-level conversation about art, culture, modernism, morality ... and shoes. What you’re really buying, at Maxfield, is this subtext, this wealth of mind-expanding things you may not know about.

There is something that feels sincerely radical about $3,000 jeans, rare art books, sex tools, the viscount’s old luggage, Le Corbusier patio chairs and human skulls all being sold in the same room. But is Maxfield truly avant-garde, or is it sexily complicit, capitalist luxury kitsch?

Only Mr. Perse’s hairdresser knows for sure, and you can bet your Balmain boots she always looks flawless.

MAXFIELD

8825 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles; (310) 274-8800.

PERSE Haute-style arbiter Tommy Perse stocks an inventory selected with utmost care by well-traveled grown-ups, placing razor’s-edge lines like Dsquared and Maniac alongside the luxe-iest household items, and uncharacteristically young and nasty-looking Chanel suits ($5,945).

PURSE Among the privileged clientele are with-it celebrities and voraciously spoiled brats. Actual overheard dialogue: “Don’t be so weird, Dad! It’s, like, $14,000. Whatever. I want to look at Comme des Garçons.”

PERVERSE A Prada motorcycle helmet made of zebra hide ($1,635). Stuffed white peacocks standing over Ed Ruscha photo books. Black Japanese golf bags, covered with skulls, for the Hells Angel who has everything. Who knew heaven was black?

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Egypt Baby,” pencil on newsprint, Cintra Wilson circa 2000-2010