Fashion & Style: High fashion goes to market
Source: Independent, The; London (UK)
Publication date: 2004-04-08
WITH WESTWOOD fever currently gripping the capital, preparations are well underway for that other great female fashion force of the past 30 years, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, to make her mark on the city. The Japanese-born designer is set to honour London with her presence in a big way this autumn with the opening of a six- storey venture in Dover Street that will combine office space with fashion retailing, and more. "I want to create a kind of market where various people from all walks of life gather and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of strong and beautiful chaos," Kawakubo says in one of her customarily utopian statements. Whichever way you look at it, this most recent project is the latest in a long line of pioneering and hugely dynamic endeavours from an inexhaustible creative force that continues to inspire.
Because, just as Kawakubo has dominated fashion, so she has led the way with fragrance - a perfume proudly decreed 100 per cent artificial, for example - and, indeed, retail outlets. Her stores have sometimes been big-name architect-designed - past collaborations have been with Future Systems, to name but one - sometimes more free-flowing, depending on the mood of the time.
Speaking to Women's Wear Daily earlier this month, Comme des Garcons' managing director - and Kawakubo's partner - Adrian Joffe likened the new project to Kensington Market, that ramshackle warren of independent units of yore, once home to everyone from the underground designer of Taboo fame, Rachel Auburn, to Johnsons, and a rockabilly mecca for anyone worth their big black biker boots and tough leather jackets. While few specifics are yet confirmed, Joffe would say that about two-thirds of the space would be devoted to retail, with six to eight anchor tenants, and up to 20 other enterprises, some with small "stalls". In an unusually democratic move, designers will range from big-name to entirely unknown.
This is very Comme des Garcons. Several of the label's own collections - there are 10 in total - will be showcased throughout the building. The Comme des Garcons Brook Street store, a franchise unit operated since 1987 by Browns, will close, although its proprietress, Joan Burstein - largely responsible for bringing Comme to London in the first place - will still carry one or two lines in her South Molton Street store.
At Dover Street, meanwhile, as well as clothes there will be space set aside for furniture, food, flowers, and perhaps even a hair-styling service. Office tenants would be, for example, graphic designers and artistic consultants, Joffe has said, "not fund managers - it's not a department store and it's not a concept store. We want to maintain an atmosphere of creative tension."
Comme des Garcons has, of course, been doing just that since it was invited on to the Paris catwalk for the first time, in 1981. Not content with continuing to design some of the most innovative clothes in the world (see below) - and supporting younger designers with a similar aim, Junya Watanabe included - the label has also recently branched out with another new retail concept: the guerrilla store. Two of these have opened so far, in deliberately unfashionable areas of Barcelona and Berlin, with more planned everywhere, from London, again, to Ljubljana in the near future.
They are run in partnership with local residents. Comme des Garcons approves the space, which is moved into without further ado. The idea is to work with what's already there, so there are minimal refurbishing costs - Berlin and Barcelona came in at around EUR2,000 and EUR3,000 respectively. Comme des Garcons provides the merchandise on a sale-or-return basis, and then leaves it up to individual store managers to run the place.
No guerrilla store will be open for longer than a year: "The reasoning is that we expect these up-and-coming areas to change, to have upped and come after a year, so we'd want to move anyway," Joffe explains. "You could say that the more successful we are, the more we'll want to move!"
It's a brilliantly brave and typically bold venture, and a far cry from the slick, outrageously expensive designer flagship stores that spring up in more obvious fashion capitals. But Comme des Garcons is quick to point out that the Dover Street Market will be a different animal entirely. Although the process is relatively organic - for that reason the store will be open in no more than a few months after signing the lease - some areas will be expensively designed, others will be more raw depending on the person moving in there. The Dover Street Market will also be permanent. "What matters now is product, good clothes and accessories, and creative expression, not so much so-called designed interiors," Kawakubo says.
Publication date: 2004-04-08
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