’Daring to tread into the unknown’: a first look inside Dover Street Market Paris
Dover Street Market reveals the interior of its new Rei Kawakubo-designed Paris outpost, marking a new chapter for the inventive fashion store
![Interiors of Dover Street Market Paris store](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/d33aF5qG2GR75xYVBLaPSX-415-80.jpg)
‘Beautiful chaos,’ is how Adrian Joffe describes the ‘credo’ of Dover Street Market, the unconventional fashion store that he opened with his wife, Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo, on London’s Dover Street in 2014. Part of the Comme des Garçons umbrella – the Japanese fashion label known for its avant-garde collections and anti-fashion approach – Dover Street Market, which now has outposts around the world, has always struck a similar mood. Featured designers and brands straddle both establishment and counterculture, while the ever-changing, inventive interiors feature not only clothing but installations and pop-ups spanning art, photography and literature, even food.
The store’s latest outpost – which marks the eighth Dover Street Market – is revealed today (10 May 2024), before its opening later this month on 24 May 2024. ’[It is] an experiment in un-understanding,’ says Joffe, who serves as the store’s president, noting that the Marais location marks a departure of sorts from the existing Dover Street Market outposts, whereby brands have been separated into individual concessions. Here, the entire space – including the requisite Rose Bakery café – is designed by Kawakubo.
Inside the new Dover Street Market Paris
The exterior courtyard, which currently houses an exhibition by photographer Paolo Roversi
It lends the store – which is housed in the 17th-century Hôtel de Coulanges, once resided in by French writer Madame de Sevigné – a starker appearance than the existing locations, which have a collage-like appearance thanks to the market-like concessions. Here, Kawakubo says she wants the store design itself to be the statement, with a focus not on selling garments – no clothes will be visible from the street, for example – but rather a space in which shoppers can immerse themselves. ‘We have arrived at a place, not a forest nor a plateau, not a valley nor a peak. Just a place with a beautiful view of behind and above,’ explains Joffe (Kawakubo did not want to be quoted about the project). ’And from this station-location, we try to feel where we go next.’
The curving installations are designed by Rei Kawakubo to invite discovery
So the various brands – including the entire Comme des Garçons roster, which also features Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya – will be mixed together across the various floors (other brands include Simone Rocha, Rick Owens, Prada, JW Anderson, Willy Chavarria, Craig Green, Wales Bonner and Kiko Kostadinov, among several others). The idea is for the shopper to immerse themselves in the curving, labyrinthine displays, which recall the recently opened Comme des Garçons store on Paris’ Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré – also conceived by Kawakubo – where the designer said she wanted to invite a mood of discovery, a place to explore and experiment.
’It will not be only another shop,’ says Joffe. ’It is in fact already a building in which we hope to build and open a new pathway ahead, building on everything we have accomplished and daring to tread in the unknown. A building that already contains a brand development division and spaces to do all kinds of actions to create an energy-synergy syntax.’
Housed in the 17th-century Hôtel de Coulanges, most of the spaces are stripped back to their essence
The store itself – spanning 1,100 sq m and centring around a courtyard set back from the road – occupies the ground and first floors of the building, as well as one of three basements. The other two basements will be reserved for art and community events, while the upper floors will be occupied by Dover Street Market’s brand development team. An exhibition by Paolo Roversi, celebrating his longtime collaboration with Comme des Garçons, will celebrate the opening.
’Too many explanations can detract from the own-eye-witnessing,’ concludes Joffe. ’I am impatient for all of you to discover it.’
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Dover Street Market Paris, 35-37, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, Paris 75004, opens on 24 May 2024.
The exhibition of works by Paolo Roversi, a longtime Comme des Garçons collaborator
Jack Moss is the Fashion Features Editor at Wallpaper*, joining the team in 2022. Having previously been the digital features editor at AnOther and digital editor at 10 and 10 Men magazines, he has also contributed to titles including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Mr Porter’s The Journal and more, while also featuring in Dazed: 32 Years Confused: The Covers, published by Rizzoli. He is particularly interested in the moments when fashion intersects with other creative disciplines – notably art and design – as well as championing a new generation of international talent and reporting from international fashion weeks. Across his career, he has interviewed the fashion industry’s leading figures, including Rick Owens, Pieter Mulier, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Christian Lacroix, Kate Moss and Manolo Blahnik.
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