BigShinyThing

Everyone loves to talk about the iPod’s ‘halo effect’ whereby consumers fell in love with one product and then got sucked into the whole Apple brand. But now Rei Kawakubo and her husband, Adrian Joffe of directional Japanese fashion label Comme des Garcons have hit on a new way to pull ‘em in.

Instead of air-lifting the usual flash flagship store (we’re talking about you, Abercrombie & Fitch) into the capital, Kawakubo and Joffe opened a market in Dover Street, Mayfair, which Vogue describes as “a 13,000 sq ft, six-floor love letter to all things design and visual”. They invited a number of exclusive luxury brands such as Lanvin, Azzedine Alaia and up-and-coming ones like Undercover and Giles Deacon; let them design their own spaces within the store and then mixed it up with taxidermy, vintage Chinese posters, rare books and a bakery.

The space breaks many retail rules — not least in that the designers weren’t allowed to dictate who they sat next to in the store. It is essentially a posh co-op. Thirty percent of the shop is taken up by designer concessions, from whom Dover Street takes a small cut of their profits; 30 percent more goes to the smaller designers who Joffe, Kawakubo and the store’s general manager Dickon Bowden find, what to help out and buy from. Rei doesn’t even edit the collections, allowing the designers to create their own mini-markets within it. Joffe says,

Rei thinks it is not that clever to have a big ego, but that it is much easier, much nicer, much more intelligent to give people their freedom.

The resultant mish mash has attracted not only the cream of the fashion world (that should probably be creme) but lead Vogue to breathlessly describe the space as “the coolest shop in the world”.

One of the featured designers, big-in-the-80s accessories guru Judy Blame, says, “Being in Dover Street has made people look at my work again. Theirs is a real creative generosity, which is unusual in this business where everyone is usually so guarded. Because it’s Rei’s store, it has a personal tone and is like being invited into a family home.”

And it’s not just the invited designers who are doing well. Joffe says that since Dover Street Market opened, sales of their own line Comme des Garcons have gone “way, way up… because we have gained customers who wouldn’t have come into the old store. They had a preconceived notion of what Comme des Garcons was all about and now that has been changed for the better.”

Vogue terms this effect ‘commercial karma’ — a revolution in the bitchy world of fashion retail. We like to think of Dover Street as fashion 2.0 because a collective intelligence prevails. Just listen to Rei describe her vision — it mirrors that of Linux, Wikipedia and so on:

I want to create a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos: the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision.

Mannequin wears Judy Blame, Dover Street Market. From WhatAboutBlack’s flickr.