Paris Dover Street Market’s store / Dover Street Market Paris

For The Washington Post

CBS Hosts Vice Presidential Debate

Contributor

retail sales,shopping

The Washington Post

The latest brand to join the Limited Too-aesthetic revival: Limited Too


FILE PHOTO: Shoppers in New York’s SoHo

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns in Green Bay

Chitose Abe Portraits

Photographer

FTWP

Michael S. Jeffries, Michael Jeffries

staff

Howard University Centennial Celebration in Washington DC

NYFW: The Giorgio Armani Fashion Show.

Jordy Arthur, Beligan Fashion Designer

NYFW: The Victorias Secret Fashion Show.

Vogue digital cover featuring Kamala Harris

PFW: Miu Miu Fashion Show at Paris Fashion Week.

PFW: Valentino Fashion Show at Paris Fashion Week.

handout

PFW: Loewe Fashion Show at Paris Fashion Week.

PFW: All in Fashion Show at Paris Fashion Week.

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Whether leaderboard ad sticky behavior is disabled

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show expanded byline information on articles

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Show the Balance of Power component on the new Election subnav component

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Enable new Elections subnav on Site pages

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

If true, will use a spoofed user agent to scrape and summarize content from paywalled sources

flip back to old full page reload when new updates come in

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Keep up with the latest in fashion and beauty

See more on this topic in your recommendations

Fashion

Style Memo newsletter

Entertainment alerts

PARIS — On one of the last days of Fashion Week here this past fall, the world’s most unusual store was bustling with desire. A young man was trying on a cartoonish but life-size leather snake, a handbag by the funky comedian of clothes Walter Van Beirendonck that wraps diagonally around the body. Two friends cooed over a fluffy pink double-breasted Dries Van Noten coat that looked like cotton candy tailored into stately submission. “It’s the only coat you’ll ever need,” one said, improbably.

“You really have to have them,” a man said, very seriously, as his friend looked at a pair of sneakers covered in haywire tufts of brown and beige goat hair. The shoes, by the craft-obsessed Italian house Bottega Veneta, sat on a glossy white cylinder that jutted out into a space-age angle, with various handbags dotting its surface like aliens making contact.

Winding through the store’s odd series of elliptical spaces, a number of visitors seemed to get lost, turning a corner only to find an awkward dead end of white walls collapsing in on one another. Young shopkeepers, most dressed in Comme des Garçons or designs of inscrutable origins, stood at the ready, offering to help visitors try something on. Their arms are never crossed; they make a point of nodding when speaking to you; they gesture with their palms, not their fingers.

Dover Street Market, which opened this newest outpost in Paris in May, is known for selling strange clothes arranged in surprising and counterintuitive ways. “This sense of discovery is the central premise — this concept of beautiful chaos and this collision,” said Dickon Bowden, the vice president of Dover Street International’s seven stores around the world.

It is more like a store from cinema than a department store, although that is technically what it is. But you don’t go to Dover Street because you need a new pair of sneakers to run errands on the weekends or because you have heavy sweaters and need a lighter one. There is no “shoe department,” no delineation between “luxury” and mid-priced clothes, no Ralph Lauren “section.”

“We buy things that [designers] don’t make or nobody else wants,” said Adrian Joffe, the president of Dover Street International and its parent company, Comme des Garçons. “Strong show pieces” — the outrageous things that debut on the runway and are rarely seen again except perhaps in museums — “is what we sell better than anybody.”

There is not an atmosphere of decadence and luxury, even though you can buy a $6,000 coat or a $7,800 pearl necklace. (The website is also comically bare-bones.) In fact, the plain white walls and displays at Dover Street can feel cheap. That’s because they are: “Try to do this space for $5,000, not $50,000,” Joffe said he often tells designers who are asked to create special displays of their clothes. “See what you can do with that.”

Cyril Zannettacci/Agence VU

The labels are hidden, and the brands mashed together illogically: hyper-girly clothes next to hypebeast T-shirts, the stalwart <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/10/25/sacai-chitose-abe-profile/" target=_blank>Sacai</a> next to the unsung Shushu/Tong. “There’s no spaces for brands, there’s no logos, there’s no ‘brand experience’ here,” said Joffe of the Paris store. “Really, Rei had the idea,” Joffe said. “She offered, ‘Why don’t I do all the space for everybody and let the spaces talk rather than the brands?’” Rei is Rei Kawakubo, the sphinxian founder of the Comme des Garçons empire. The capricious layout is intentional. “She says the more you work hard to find something that you like, the more pleasure that you’ll get from it in the end.”

“Pleasure” is something we rarely associate with the acquisition of clothes. During the past few years, fast-fashion monoliths such as Shein and Temu became household names by infiltrating social media. Shopping for cheap clothes became a form of entertainment for the housebound. Where you wore the clothes — whether you wore them at all — was beside the point. Buying a lot was the point, until it no longer could be: As inflation crept up, and luxury brands began spiking their prices with boneheaded arrogance, we became convinced that barrel-bottom prices — $16.49 for a dress, $24.49 for a skirt suit — were logical, making something like J.Crew’s men’s wool sweaters, perennially marked down from $138 to $89.50, seem pricey.

It’s often assumed that we shop because we believe — we have been convinced, against reason — that products will make our lives better. (If only I had this dress …) But that’s not really true. Gone are the days when you lingered in front of a department store or even a Zara window, imagining that, if you had this or that, you would be more confident, more assured, sexier, desired, successful.

Store windows today are more like neglected deserts: mannequins half-dressed, randomly arranged. Phones have replaced those fantastical landscapes with data-driven, ad-packed imagery that promises to deliver exactly what you need rather than showing you what you might want.

Dover Street, in Paris, doesn’t have windows. Other outposts do, although Kawakubo likes to cover them or fill them with things like enormous balls. (The company now has locations in Beijing, Tokyo’s Ginza district, New York, Singapore and Los Angeles.) In the London store, the first Dover Street, Kawakubo moved the door from the main thoroughfare to a side alley, “so, in effect, making it even harder” to access, Bowden said.

“Ultimately, if it’s in your face,” Joffe said, “you see it in the window and you go in and have it. Where’s the pleasure in that?”

In large part, what makes Dover Street unusual is its subversion of the marketing machinery of fashion. Fashion companies are extraordinarily controlling, and what you see in most stores is a highly prescribed result of image manicuring and dealmaking. Designers often ask that a store buy a specific range of goods; they may decline to sell them others. If the store holds some cards — like Bergdorf Goodman, with its marquee sheen of luxury, or Ssense, with its gloss of cool — it might request certain pieces be carried by no one else. Where a brand is placed is decided not by the buyers or managers but by the brands; who they are next to, or in what department, is of great importance, and buyers often have to massage egos when it comes to moving a brand even from one side of a floor to the other.

At Dover, the brand combinations are motivated by mischief. They sit down with the zoning plans and “decide how to mess it up,” Joffe said. “It’s also an anti-departmentalization thing that I think is important to us.”

What draws people to Dover Street is exaltation of desire, an affirmation of the very human need to fantasize. For designers, the exercise of putting something surprising or beautiful on a runway often takes precedence, while retail is a mundane duty. (An artist known for working with fashion houses told me that she had nothing to say about the idea of buying clothes: “I’m a Marxist, not a shopper.”) But at Dover Street, the extremes of the theoretical (fantasy) and practical (cost, daily life) collide.

There are three men in charge of Dover Street Market — Joffe, Bowden and James Gilchrist, the vice president of Comme and Dover Street Americas; each talks like someone squeezed an esoteric citrus fruit over their voice. (Joffe is from South Africa, Gilchrist from Scotland and Bowden from England.) Along with the brand matriarch, Kawakubo, they are not precious about what they do. They prickle when it is described as art. “It’s a total business. Rei rejects the idea that she’s an artist. It’s creation. Why is creation necessarily art? You can be creative in all aspects of your life — you know, the way you handle yourself, the way you talk to people, the way you do business,” Joffe said.

“Egalitarian” is how Gilchrist described it. “There’s a structure, of course, in what we do,” Bowden said. There’s a seven-year plan to assure the Paris store makes back what the company spent building it. “But it’s not, ‘We need more trousers,’” Bowden said.

When the New York store opened in 2013, Supreme was on the top floor, next to Prada. A plum spot for Supreme, then a cult name, you’d think, but Gilchrist “got a right bollocking” from Supreme founder James Jebbia, Joffe said. “It wasn’t a fun surprise for him at that moment, but it ended happily.” He paused. “Many great ideas are completely rejected in the beginning. That’s a good thing.”

One of Dover Street’s imprimaturs is to help the kind of designers who might be, as it were, completely rejected in the beginning. Vaquera, one of the few genuinely creative labels in New York City, was on the verge of shuttering its business in 2020 when Gilchrist and Joffe swept in to prop up its business. “We literally would not be here if it wasn’t for them,” said Bryn Taubensee, one of the label’s two designers. Kiko Kostadinov, a London-based designer, was discovered by the buyers during his graduate show at Central Saint Martins, who had him sell his first collection out of a backpack in Comme’s Place Vendôme showroom.

“There’s a countermovement — this resurgence of creative brands versus the big guys at the top taking all of the oxygen or pulling all the focus away,” Bowden said.

Dover Street’s growth reflects a larger shift toward in-person retail. Stores are opening all over New York, especially. Weird ones: Telfar Clemens, creator of the beloved T-logo tote, opened a store with a live-stream television show this past weekend. Eco-conscious brand Collina Strada opened nearby. Ven.Space, a menswear label catering to Brooklyn dads, has consistently sold out of its products, like Lemaire shoes and the Row coats, since opening last month. Vintage stores such as Rogue and Sorbara’s have shifted customer tastes to make the decades-old piece you never knew existed into the thing you now think you can’t live without. Against the odds, stores are becoming special, even essential parts of the fabric of a city.

You can see what a society values by looking at the way it shops. For Americans, those values have been speed and specificity: We want exactly what we want as quickly as we can get it, a position fueled by vast storefronts and alarmingly swift delivery from businesses such as Amazon. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

But fashion and its decadent religion, style, are not necessarily things you need. “The pleasure purchase can afford is very brief,” Kennedy Fraser, the New Yorker’s longtime fashion critic, once observed. “The best things, however, are bought erratically. They are often spotted quite by chance, when we are really concentrating on the search for something else.”

Contemporary life makes little room for chance. Indeed, it makes little room for desire or fantasy, for imagination and longing. Dover Street’s ability to gather people, not just clothes, by insisting on the euphoria of in-person shopping is what makes it interesting. Shoppers might come for a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/04/02/simone-rocha/" target=_blank>Simone Rocha</a> book-signing, which the Paris store hosted in October, and meet the designer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2024/02/11/nyfw-willy-chavarria-khaite-eckhaus-latta/" target=_blank>Willy Chavarria</a>. The bizarre fantasies that happen before you buy something can be just as rewarding as owning it. “The more trouble and wars and terrible things going on, people need to be with other people and escape for a moment from reality,” Joffe said. Shopping reveries don’t have to end with plunking down a credit card.

“We have to remember, there are some people for whom, you know, clothes just won’t do it for them,” Mellany Sanchez, a stylist and creative consultant, recently told me.

Sanchez is a Dover Street fanatic. She recalls wandering into the New York store with no agenda and buying a hooded Alaïa wrap top. “I believe in that piece. It makes me feel like I need nothing else.”

This is the kind of thing we usually think about a crew-neck cashmere sweater, say, or a pair of jeans you can wear four times a week. She talks about a bag that can only be carried in her hands — a major inconvenience that she enjoys taking on as a sacrifice to style. And in a world where very little can be controlled, where everything is geared toward being the fastest and the sleekest, a bag that slows you down reminds you that you are not a machine, but a human.

“Yes, a beachfront vacation is great,” she said. “But have you ever walked on a New York City block in a good outfit?”

ASME nominee for reviews and criticism, 2023

University of Pennsylvania, BA in English and art history

Rachel Tashjian is a fashion writer at The Washington Post.

Rachel Tashjian

How Dover Street Market is reinventing shopping 

the-washington-post

Arts & Entertainments

Power

The Media

Of Interest

Style

washpost

prism://prism.query/two-sites,/style/fashion,/lifestyle/fashion/&limit=20

Fashion - The Washington Post

Coverage of fashion from The Washington Post. The latest headlines and breaking news on the fashion industry and fashion’s influence on culture.

Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.

Style - The Washington Post

Style is the source for breaking news and trending topics on fashion, culture, and anything of interest. You’ll find in-depth coverage of the media and entertainment including the latest in movies, music and tv.

How an unusual kind of department store is reinventing shopping

Dover Street Market, which has locations around the world, aims for the serendipity and desire that’s been lost in the search for what to wear.