Andy Warhol's Former Studio Building Now Home To Uniqlo Store

A familiar corner of Union Square is about to gain a new tenant - and an old art-world ghost. On April 3, Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo is set to open its seventh New York location at 860 Broadway, the commercial building at Broadway and East 17th Street that once housed Andy Warhol's third-floor Factory.

Warhol, the American Pop artist (1928–1987), worked in the building for roughly a decade before leaving in 1984. Since then, the address has cycled through distinctly unglamorous chapters: an '80s nightclub called the Underground, then a Petco in the mid-1990s. Petco relocated nearby in 2023, and the building's ground-floor retail space has sat empty in the years since.

Uniqlo's arrival ends that vacancy, but the brand is also leaning into the site's cultural residue. In social media promotion for the opening weekend, the retailer posted a black-and-white photograph from 1983 showing Warhol posed before a wall featuring a sideways American flag. The post also highlights Warhol's 1978 print“Self-Portrait with Skull.” Both images will appear on T-shirts and tote bags sold exclusively at the new Union Square store. The Warhol Foundation is tagged in the post.

It remains unclear whether Uniqlo's footprint extends beyond the ground floor to the third floor where Warhol's Factory once operated. Either way, the marketing makes the connection explicit: the store's debut is framed not simply as another retail opening, but as a small act of neighborhood mythmaking - a way of borrowing Warhol's aura for a contemporary consumer ritual.

The strategy fits comfortably within Uniqlo's long-running approach to artist licensing. The company has previously released collaborations tied to globally recognized names including KAWS, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It has also partnered with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on collections featuring works by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Warhol, of course, built a career on collapsing the distance between art and commerce, treating advertising, branding, and repetition as both subject matter and method. The question of what he might have made of his image selling fast-fashion cotton and canvas totes is impossible to answer, but the institutional framework around his legacy has increasingly embraced licensing as a tool.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which disbanded its art authentication arm in 2011, has since placed greater emphasis on licensing - a shift that has helped shape how Warhol circulates in the present tense: not only in museums and auction rooms, but in the everyday economy of images.

With Uniqlo's doors opening at 860 Broadway, that circulation becomes literal. A building once associated with Warhol's production now hosts a different kind of factory - one that turns art history into wearable merchandise, and tests, again, how comfortably the market can carry an artist's afterlife.

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