Dover Street Market Is Coming To Paris
This year marks two decades since the first Dover Street Market concept retail shop arrived at 17-18 Dover Street in Mayfair. Twenty years and five additional global locations, one parfume hub and one relocation — Dover Street to Haymarket — Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe will open the eighth Dover Street Market, this time in Paris. It will stage exhibitions. It will have philosophic, distinctive and anarchic points of view. It will combine fashion with food, arts with artists, literature with entertainment and music with community. Dover Street Market Paris aims to maintain the independent spirit of the original 3537 location that housed its incubator of spunky designer start-ups.
Designed entirely by Rei Kawakubo, Dover Street Market Paris spans two floors, three basements and a courtyard. Interior design, much like other Dover Street Market retail manifestos, remains in a state of modularity. The glee behind the Dover Street Market concept is its anti-Legos approach to prescriptive retail models. Removing concrete contexts from fashion elements leaves room to experience different emotions while you navigate those thorny Balenciaga Rodeo bags snaking around the last Simone Rocha mens shirt you wanted in frilly embroidered tulle. Just think of the Dover Street Market Paris playground as a refreshed Lyceum where you can freely debate concepts, like which Comme des Garçons universe campaign is better, Jim Britt’s ‘Sisters’ versus Ronnie Cooke Newhouse’s ‘Uncommon Object’ (a personal fave).
For those missing the old days of navigating concrete cold caves punctuated by industrial blue steel, wood pillars and peeking through junkyard fences while fixating on that Vaquera neon guipure blouse, do not worry. ERL, Random Identities, Brett Westfall and Vaquera are sticking around while their incubator, Dover Street Market Paris (DSMP), still exists upstairs plotting more ways to innovate by supporting energetic young upstarts like Olly Shinder.
Rei Kawakubo and husband Adrian Joffe fully acknowledge that their expansive concepts do not regard restrictions much. Instead they achieve positive momentum to innovate aesthetic skeletal systems with heightened consciousness as a constant driver. Their big-hearted attraction for the unknown is how gigantic courtyard installations resembling paper mugs without handles, from photographer Paolo Roversi, come to be. Walking up, being greeted by outsized images defines Kawakubo's extreme ambitions for the shop. Roversi’s Yelena and Sharon in ‘Dress Meets Body…’ is the resolute Dover Street Paris new world. Anna Cleveland in ‘Blood and Roses’ and Molly Bair in that A/W 04 smudged seductive regalia are dual resolutes — humanity and aesthetic — to innovate each wall, each cleaved partition inside Dover Paris. ‘We have consoled ourselves in our complicit connections and celebrated our unrivaled sense of community,’ says Joffe. It feels like (from them) a big group hug.
Kawakubo and Joffe's quiet riot that yields complicity proceeds to the basement level where London’s favourite maximalist, Matty Bovan, makes himself at home with an installation. Family reunions pepper the Dover Street compound as cousins Melitta Baumeister, Jun Takahashi, Walter Van Beirendonck and Charles Jeffrey nestle themselves into the nooks and crannies of Kawakubo’s map with ‘no map.’ Begin your countdown now. The space ship shop blasts off on 24 May.
