Like its sister store in London Coach Bags, Dover Street Market Ginza (DSMG) hews to Kawakubo’s notion of “beautiful chaos.” “I see it as the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision,” says the designer who not only conceived all the spaces for her Comme des Garçons brands as well as spaces for several others labels but also curated the selection of artists, architects and set designers whose work is installed throughout the building’s six floors.
In 2004, Rei Kawakubo, the genius behind the Japanese brand Comme des Garçons, introduced a new retail concept to London. Dover Street Market, named for its location in London’s tony Mayfair neighborhood, is a mash-up of market, department store and museum. Individual concessions handpicked by Kawakubo, which run the gamut from luxury labels like Lanvin and Azzedine Alaïa to the utilitarian wares of Labour & Wait and the edible goods of Rose Bakery, share space with art and design installations and the multiple labels in the Comme des Garçons fashion family. Last week, Kawakubo opened Dover Street Market in Tokyo, doubling its size and placing it squarely in the center of Ginza, the city’s shopping mecca, where venerable department stores, luxury boutiques and the supersize flagship stores of brands like Uniqlo line the streets. Adrian Joffe, Kawakubo’s husband and business partner, says that he and Kawakubo were offered the space in the old Ginza Komatsu department store and that “we were excited by the challenge of setting up shop in the conservative traditional Ginza area.”
The response to Dover Street in Tokyo has been “phenomenal,” Joffe says. “Far beyond our expectations.” But the even better news? A Dover Street Market is scheduled to open in New York City in 2013.
“Pulse Coach Bags,” the Kyoto sculptor Kohei Nawa‘s series of whirling white pillars, provides a recurring motif, providing an escalator screen on every floor. Elsewhere, sculptural steel skating shelters, designed by the Vancouver firm Patkau Architects, sit majestically in the center of a circular, skating-rink-like space while the surreal “Wasp Factory,” an installation by the production designer (and longtime Comme des Garçons collaborator) Michael Howells takes over the top floor. Kawakubo has invited a number of Japanese labels into the mix, including A Bathing Ape, Kolor, Mastermind, Sacai and Visvim, but there is no distinction between luxury and street wear or for that matter men’s and women’s wear. And if that is not enough to lead shoppers on what Kawakubo calls “a voyage of the unexpected Coach Bags,” the store itself promises to be reconfigured every six months. (Speaking of redesigns, on April 7 Kawakubo will unveil her newly redone Comme des Garçons flagship in Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood.)
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