Kat Milne is the designer behind fashion’s most intriguing retail spaces

On the seventh floor of Dover Street Market New York, a larger-than-life hand marks the start of the Marc Jacobs space. Its nails are long, light pink, and encrusted with chunky rhinestones (just like the bedazzled sets Jacobs himself wears). The supersize talons are the work of Kat Milne, a New York-based designer whose work encompasses stores, spatial design and creative direction. Working with established and emerging brands – from Marc Jacobs and Nike to Sandy Liang and Climax Books – Milne creates spaces at once refined and playful, skilfully merging her own recognisable aesthetic and that of the label.

Having grown up predominantly in Tokyo, with stints in Hong Kong, India and Malaysia, Milne’s perspective on design is multifaceted. ‘My father is British and my mother is a New Yorker, but my design is more informed by my upbringing in East Asia and it's those principles that I carry with me,’ she says.

Milne studied architecture at university in New York and cut her teeth in-house at Marc Jacobs, working on global store design, pop-ups, activations and the like. Some of her first projects were the brand’s Heaven stores, with all the pop-art colours, neon lighting and cartoon characters that the diffusion line has become renowned for. ‘I was given so much creative freedom,’ she says. ‘It's a surprisingly tight team, so that allowed me to grab a lot of opportunities. It became a springboard for me to start my own practice.’

Milne’s designs tend to feature elements of the surreal. There’s the aforementioned fake nails for Marc Jacobs, a huge puffy star for a recent Sandy Liang pop-up in Seoul, and at Climax Books in New York, a bench with butter yellow latex cushions. She describes it as ‘a central point of tension’. ‘I'm always chasing the hair standing up on the back of your neck,’ she says. ‘Climax is a great example: it's a nod to a sex shop, a little bit 18 plus, but then really elevated, stylised, editorial.’

The frosted pink vinyl covering the shopfront – so ‘everything you see inside is a blur’ – forms an indirect and unconventional invitation to anyone wandering by. Milne has worked with Climax founder Isabella Burley on a new London flagship, which opened this past weekend and builds on these intriguing visual codes: there’s latex, mirrors and a new gallery window, whose inaugural work is a Sarah Lucas photograph, on loan from gallery Sadie Coles.

For all the slightly uncanny points of interest that appear in Milne’s work, she also makes clever use of negative space and unfussy materials like metal and wood. This sensibility harks back to her upbringing in Japan, where there is also a focus on ‘the transition space’. ‘I think about creating separation between the street and the world you’re walking into,’ she says. ‘How you can either give people a soft landing or a shocking one. And hopefully doing that with a sense of humour, not being too self-serious or exclusionary.’

The act of collaboration proves inspiring for Milne. ‘One of my favourite things is to work with a brand on their first space,’ she says. ‘What I love is entering the brains of the founder – through everything they consume or imagine their customer consuming. With Sandy, we talk about movies a lot: Sofia Coppola, Studio Ghibli. With Isabella, it's books and photographers. That helps me understand how they want the space to feel.’ Her most recent opportunity to start from scratch has been with cult film studio A24, on a retail project spanning multiple Barnes & Noble stores in the US.

‘The question was what does A24 look like when it doesn't represent one specific film? That was an interesting proposition.’ The resulting design is a light, ‘shadow’-like structure, with a translucence that allows the varied merchandise to almost float and co-exist together. Like much of Milne’s work, the goal was to create something unexpectedly compelling – but always ‘really letting the product speak for itself’.

The nature of shopping itself has evolved in recent years, and Milne approaches these physical outposts as more than simply commercial: ‘I think especially post-Covid, people are looking for a more tactile experience – where you can shop, but maybe just hang out. That's what makes a store worth going to.’

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