Voilà, Le Gap!

How did the most American of retailers get mixed up with a hoity-toity Parisian boutique? Choire Sicha heads up to Merci Gap to survey the T-shirts, shop-kids and couture.

At the south end of Manhattan’s prime shopping strip, at Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, there is a tiny Parisian store with a third arrondissement address. Confusing!

Shoppers pop in, and store-children explain: This is the joyously confusing temporary outpost of the equally baffling French store Merci, which opened in Paris in June.

At the Fifth Avenue store, a video plays of the Paris store, to help slow Americans parse, as they browse a mix of porcelain pewter plates (made in Italy, $69, 27.5 centimeters) and women’s wear (a lone, tiny Herve Leger black silk dress, $1850).

It is like Santa’s French workshop in there, and the conceptual prank is in a way on Gap, which volunteered its massively expensive Fifth Ave. ground-floor retail to these out-of-towners.

"So it's a big store?” asked a customer.

"Fifteen thousand square feet," said the sales clerk, who was, in fact, an employee of the Gap. For the store is actually a conceptual undertaking, tucked into a storefront owned by that most Main Street of American retailers.

Anita Borzyszkowska, Gap's VP for PR, based in London (but in New York for a week each month), explained that Gap and Merci shared a worldview. "The Merci philosophy is that, as well as being philanthropic, things don't have to be incredibly expensive in order to be beautiful and be great quality and very appealing, and that's what we aim for at Gap as well," she said.

Merci is owned by Marie-France and Bernard Cohen. A few years ago, the Cohens sold off their kids' store Bonpoint—you may remember the brand from Michelle Obama's shopping trip there this summer.

But here in America, they were definitely falling into the Gap, as the commercial used to say. There was even a brisk trade in gray T-shirts up front that say "Merci" in red, some in sans serif, some in a suspiciously Coke-ey script (circa $25). Still, there is vintage couture in the back. And some crystal thingies from Prague!

Well. Perhaps it is the French flair of the Cohens that connotes class even while dabbling in Gap, but they do not feel so common. Mme. Cohen was in New York for the first week the store was open, and she delighted in wrapping customers’ newly bought packages herself. It took her an indescribably long time to prepare a vintage Yves Saint Laurent dress; it was an art, an easily distracted art, and one that would make a typical New York buy-it-and-return-it professional shopper scream.