occupation: owner and manager of Paracelso in NYC

About the “decadent movement” poet, Rimbaud, Luxor said that he stopped writing at 18 years old and found refuge in the desert, and people would say, “they are looking for you in Paris, what are you doing, you are the darling of Paris, of the high society, and he said, what a bore, let me be here in the desert.” Luxor Tavella

For those who yearn for authenticity and the unpretentious creative universe of NYC of the late 60′s, 70′s and 80′s, you must take in every word of Luxor’s video. There is hardly anyone who hasn’t become someone, who hasn’t passed through the doors of her shop to get a taste of one who defines the word purist (she barely lets her picture be taken, because she believes with each photo of yourself you are giving away a piece of your soul). She recalls Andy Warhol dropping off the first Interview magazines for free and how amused she was by Basquiat when he came to visit. Laying naked in the sun of St. Tropez eighteen hours a day was too “boring” for her and she has literally traveled to the ends of the earth to satisfy her passion for primitive places. Luxor desciribes her Catholic education with nuns as severe, but feels that her religious background made her full of gratitude. Today, she is a devout believer in all things Zen, including no internet, tv, or cell phone and feels that disorganization is a a gift of the highly artistic and atuned (the key is to be centered within it). At eight-years-old, she was surrounded by the books of her brother, with authors like Dostoevsky and Kafka and poets like Verlaine and Rimbaud, and dreamt of Paris when reading Jean Paul Sartre. A tribal princess in the middle of West Broadway, in layers of to die for indigenous fabrics , Luxor’s style is probably most defined by her face paint that she has been wearing for thirty years everyday and says that she feels naked without. This particular design is inspired by her experiences of living with both the Berber women of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, whose eyebrows were crooked because they didn’t have mirrors, and the blue men of Tuareg, who wear blankets that rub off on their skins until it turns blue. There is something a little bitter sweet about Luxor and her shop, which is brimming over with images and things of one who has so fully embraced life and cultures, admidst the Times-Square, mallish, homogeneization of Soho, where rarity is a lost art.
Couldn’t help but see a ressemblance to Luxor’s aesthetic in Rodarte’s spring collection, though I think a painted face mask would have been a better touch.

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