A new book that traces the rise and fall of New York design store Moss, written by its former owners, has made Aaron Betsky nostalgic for the "theatre" of retail they created.

At the turn of the millennium, the true "mecca of modernism" was not the Museum of Modern Art, but Moss. A store selling designed objects curated ? as we would now say ? by the eponymous Murray Moss with his partner, Franklin Gretchell, Moss offered a window onto a world where every form and surface was perfect.
It was such a crystal-clear view at least in part because Murray Moss cleaned every window and display case obsessively (he won a special award from Windex as a super user). But it was also because the impishly elegant store owner would tell you just how ideal each object was, while distracting you with stories about either its designer or the billionaire in the corner shopping the cases. Moss made modernism fabulous. Now Moss and Gretchell have documented their time at the store, which lasted between 1994 and 2012, in an equally fab book, Please Do Not Touch, published by Rizzoli and arriving on your coffee table with, of course, a white cover. The title was also the store's proud logo, written on T-shirts that were about the cheapest things you could buy there.
Beauty, Moss felt, was meant to be seen and admired, but not touched, and that extended to the Go Go Boys he hired to prance around in the showers showcasing the work of the Dutch design collective Droog during an...