Design for Living: A Fashion Foursome's Silver Cage

Design for Living A Fashion Foursomes Silver Cage
Back then, there were buttons, chicken bones and worse on the floor. Fluorescent lights hung like train cars at shoulder height from the ceiling, and boards and bars were on all the windows. As the two young men, Gabi and Kai, and the two young women, Ange and Adi - otherwise known as the fashion collective As Four - hacked their way through the debris in the long-abandoned fourth-floor loft on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side they would use as their workroom and then also as their home, its sweatshop history clung to it like rank breath.

When the magazines called, they would clean up in the one-bedroom they shared in a tenement on Stanton Street a few blocks away and race uptown for appointments. It was just before the millennium, and the group's indie star was rising. At the invitation of Kim Hastreiter, the co-editor of Paper Magazine, the indie fashion bible, the four had staged a show in Bryant Park using hula dolls, hundreds of them, all dressed in tiny As Four clothes and spinning to Wagner. The edgier fashion press was beside itself.

In three months - and one-and-a-half Dumpsters - the loft was empty. They painted it silver from floor to ceiling. (A problem, they say, since it invited comparisons to Andy Warhol's Factory, an unlooked-for reference.) Bjork, the elfin Icelandic pop star, wore their futuristic