These are not good times for the survival of those areas that are the essence of authenticity and uniqueness and which add that singular character which is sorely lacking in most cities. The retail and multi-brand stores that bear the taste and style of their owner are gradually disappearing in those same homogenized cities with their identical shopping streets full of multi-brand chains and other shops with insipid character that appeal only to monotony and boredom. The culture of the clone seems still not to know its limits.
It is not a pessimistic vision, it is a reality that we also perceive in other fields, but maybe in the face of so much uniformity, whenever someone or something deviates from the norm, it attracts even more attention. And one of these magical areas is Dover Street Market.
The retail sale revolution
Dover Street Market has just turned 15 and its legacy is present in the main international fashion capitals. Its creators, the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo , architect of Comme des Garçons, and her husband Adrian Joffe wanted to conceive their own experiment: an “anti-department” store, where everything flowed in the same concept, that would bring together in the same space both acclaimed or avant-garde designers and new talent. An inspirational fashion and beauty concept store dedicated to creating sensory experiences for customers with constant product renewal. The important thing is to generate surprise via novelty and the unexpected.
Dover Street Market first opened its doors in 2004 and in its day it revolutionized the retail landscape with its successful formula. The ideas of Kawakubo and Joffe were clear: they were not targeting a particular customer, nor did they want to separate the store into fixed departments. Quite the opposite: they wanted to create a unique concept where everything flowed, in accordance with the spirit of each brand, in order to capture the attention of the aesthete audience that loves both classic and avant-garde, young designers and luxury brands. A place capable of attracting and inspiring, “that stimulates the senses, elevates the spirit and makes one feel positive,” declared Joffe to Vogue.
Rei Kawakubo called it the principle of “beautiful chaos” : the desire to break with the lifelong conventions of retail trade to favour the creation of a vast collaborative area in which the friends and family of Comme des Garçons could congregate, interact with each other and present their brands in new and dynamic ways.
This innovative trading concept, together with others that have marked a trend in the last decade, has spread throughout the world, from New York to Los Angeles, Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore. The most recent area opened in October in a shop dedicated to perfumes and cosmetics in Paris: the new invention is called Dover Street Perfume Market.
