Rei is a genious, here her new project that i'm so looking forward to Rei’s ‘Guerrilla’ Approach
By Miles Socha PARIS
— Retail maverick Rei Kawakubo is about to unveil a campaign against shopping uniformity and architectural grandeur. Next month, in a remote neighborhood in the former East Berlin, Kawakubo plans to unveil her first Comme des Garçons “guerrilla” store, a temporary fashion operation whose concept is more akin to an artist’s squat than a luxury fashion temple.
“It only lasts one year, and we don’t do anything to the place,” explained Adrian Joffe, managing director of Comme des Garçons in Paris. “We just go in there, clean it up and open for business.”
The 750-square-foot Berlin store, for example, will be in the gallery-studded frontier neighborhood Mitte, in a former bookstore located next to the Bertolt Brecht museum.
Aside from the necessary fixtures for a fashion store — a sign, clothing racks, a cash desk and fixtures — the existing decor, or lack of it, is left intact. Joffe said the Berlin space, with its raw concrete walls and floor, has “incredible atmosphere,” but the idea is to put the focus on the merchandise. “What counts is the product,” he said in an interview.
“What’s important is interesting, good products, not multimillion-dollar architectural interventions.”
A second guerrilla unit is slated to bow in Barcelona in early March.
Other targeted cities include Vilnius in Lithuania, Ljubljana in Slovenia and Warsaw.
“There’s a lot of interest from Eastern Europe,” Joffe noted. However, he said he could also envision guerrilla stores in other Western Europe countries and the United States.
In each city, Comme des Garçons plans to partner with local entrepreneurs, who sign the lease and run the shop. Joffe said he and Kawakubo are charged with selecting the merchandise, an eclectic mix of new items from her various collections; selected out-of-season and vintage pieces, sneakers and other products are selected by the local partners.
from wwd
Stunning. 
