Words: Gina Tonic | Guide: Peggy Mercury | Model: Jane Martone
What’s better than being a successful creative living in New York City? Being a vintage store and art gallery owner in Kent, Connecticut. For couple James Boemer and Gregory Fricke, the pair had long held separate dreams of having a store and gallery space and in 2024, Fricke and Boemer took the plunge to finally open Peggy Mercury. The hangout zone of your dreams takes its name from Peggy Guggenheim, the patron to the arts who changed the way we view galleries forever.
That’s the first name covered and for the second, you may have your own theories but the store dispelled them quickly, clarifying that the store is not named after a certain Queen but rather the term mercurial. “It was a nod to the old Victorian slang that meant being queer, so it was partly about reclaiming language.” Co-founder Boemer tells me over Zoom. “But then it was also the idea of being mercurial and being ever changing and always fluid and constantly moving.”
As the pair prepare for one of their most anticipated shows yet - an exhibition of Lauren Pyes, a fashion collector and designer archive savant’s extensive Marc Jacobs collection - we sat down with Peggy Mercury to get their best tips on being the best curator you can be.
Look To The Past
When we decided to open, we didn't really know what Peggy Mercury was going to be. We didn't know if it would be a straightforward store. Would it feel like a general store? Would it feel like a concept store?
Then when we put everything together, we started thinking about Barney's and Biba and Fiorucci and all of these retail spaces that really were more than a store. They were these beacons of discovery. Places where you wouldn't just go to leave with something, but you would go to learn about a specific cross section of pop culture. It was fashion, it was art, it was music, it was celebrity - it was all intermingled in those places in such a perfect way. We really looked to those places, and I think that's where the gallery concept came from.
Collaborate With Peers
My friend Shane Gabriel who is a dear friend of mine, that I know from my college era in Chicago - he was one half of the fashion label Creatures of the Wind and I used to do makeup for their shows - then he pivoted from fashion when they closed the label. Shane started doing ceramics, and because Greg and I were big fans of his ceramics, it made sense to do a show with him.
Working with someone like Shane is the perfect example of us wanting to represent creatives and artists and makers at the current phase of their life - are they a former x now doing y? That started to be a through line for the artists that we wanted to curate for the gallery - People that we knew. People that we collected.
For the current show, for example, we met Lauren through our dear friend George, she’s a huge vintage fashion collector who has this insane archive of Marc Jacobs and Marc Jacobs at Vuitton, and that’s how the exhibition and archive sale came to be.
That was really exciting because aside from loving Marc Jacobs and us being so inspired by him and and his really singular voice in fashion, we both used to work on the Marc Jacobs fashion shows, so it was a fun way for us to also refer to our own history by narrowing the focus of what we're showing of Lauren's collection.
Outside of the gallery, we still collaborate with friends as much as possible. Our dear friend Justin Teodoro is an amazing artist and illustrator who created an incredible mural for the store, hand-painted with makeup products I designed in my career, and he also created the iconic PEGGY character, which appears as a doll in some of the photos. He also illustrated Lauren Pyes wearing some pieces from her Marc Jacobs archive that we will use to promote the exhibition and sale.
Keep Your Cards Close To Your Chest
One of the things that we've learned more than anything is to keep all of the cards that are in motion close to our chest. Peggy Mercury is just Greg and I: We don't have a team. We don't have business partners. We don't have investors. We obviously work with people and we collaborate with friends of ours that have brands and are artists and makers and things like that, but I think what we've learned more than anything is to keep all of our plans close to our chest because no one knows what's in motion.
Then no one knows what is up next or behind the scenes except you and if you don't share that with anyone, then there's no disappointment to manage. There's no having to back out of anything.
Keep It Personal
In general we've seen a better response to things when they've been really personal to us, like we did a little capsule collection of upcycled vintage pieces that we slightly altered with applique and graffiti. We're big collectors of vintage concert t-shirts, so we started making all of the appliques out of the unusable t-shirts.
It was actually a project that I started with my mom when she was alive - she was going to make me a quilt out of all of the exhausted concert T-shirts, and when she died last year, we found the pieces and decided to do something with them and added them to work pants and military jackets and we had a really good response to the collection.
When it comes purely from our narrative and we did it in a really instinctual way, it feels like people connect with it a little bit more.
Embrace Local Needs
When we moved up here, we realised with our close proximity to so many boarding schools in Connecticut and in New England in general, that it was important that Peggy be a place that would sort of send a beacon to these kids to to come in, feel comfortable, try on makeup, try on vintage jeans, hang out, look at books, look at old magazines, and really have it be a place where they could feel comfortable to try on a different version of themselves.
You have to give the opportunity for people to be able to dream and have access to worlds that they maybe don't have access to. One that is outside of their phone and gives them a tangible sensorial experience. They can touch it, they can smell it, they can put it on, they can smear it. That's what people really like about being here is that they can sort of carve off some time off their phones and spend time trying things on and just having an opportunity to discover something in the process.
