Starting in 1974 and continuing until 1984, the Factory of Andy Warhol was based at 860 Broadway, on the third floor of a building overlooking Union Square Park. Last April 3, in that very same building, Japanese fast fashion brand Uniqlo opened its seventh store in New York.

Behind the same walls and large windows, for ten years the most important American artist of the last century organized his work, turning a former warehouse into his Factory. The third floor was renovated by Jed Johnson, the artist's partner, together with architect Peter Marino, who a few years later would also open his own studio in New York. In the spacious rooms, punctuated by beige walls, a wide variety of artistic practices found space among Art Deco furniture that Warhol had used in the sets of his films and that remained as an integral part of the place.

Before landing on Broadway, however, the Factory had had other lives and other addresses. The most legendary had been the Silver Factory, on the fifth floor of 231 East 47th Street, active from 1963 to 1967. It was named for Billy Name, Warhol's friend and photographer, who had covered it entirely in tin foil and silver paint. He, too, had salvaged a red couch found on the sidewalk, which became famous in a number of shots and for being the sole scenic element in such films as Blow Job (1964) and Couch (1964). There the "Warhol Superstars," drag queens and speed freaks of all kinds, gathered under the sign of free love.

The second location was at 33 Union Square West, in the Decker Building, and had reconfigured itself as a more protected and exclusive space than the Silver Factory, after the three gunshots that Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist writer and frequent visitor to the Factory, fired at Warhol.

For this reason, too, and because of the growing interest of critics and the international elite, the Broadway venue ended up taking on more and more of the features of a Manhattan salon, rather than those of the open-for-all and almost unregulated workshop that the previous Factories had been.

And yet this is precisely the address that witnesses some key moments in the artistic production of Warhol and his collaborators: a heterogeneous and experimental season, though less innovative than the beginning of his career. Here Warhol opened a dialogue with a new generation of artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and filmed his Andy Warhol's TV series. It remained there until 1984. After his exit, the building went through a gradual conversion: first it housed the Underground nightclub, then, since the mid-1990s, a Petco store.

The symbolic weight of Warhol's legacy was not ignored by Uniqlo, which put the link with the artist at the center of its opening event, launching an exclusive capsule created with the Andy Warhol Foundation. An approach the Japanese brand has already experimented with by collaborating with the heirs of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but also with MoMA on works by van Gogh, Gauguin, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Lecent, profitable and, in Warhol's case, almost ironically consistent. Indeed, the affair seems a natural exasperation of his approach to art, based on his fascination with consumer products, seriality, and the reproducibility of the image. After all, the Warhol Foundation has for years identified commercial collaborations as a way to keep alive and spread the artist's lesson.