With Amoeba-Like Fixtures, Comme des Garçons Breaks the Retail Mold – WWD

PARIS — Rei Kawakubo is forever in search of the new: It’s how she designs her company, her fashions and her retail stores.

Only a few days after parading one of her most joyful, colorful collections in years, the Japanese fashion maverick unveiled an expanded Comme des Garçons flagship here, its four levels intersected with a colossal white column composed of what the company calls “amoeba” shapes, but which might also bring to mind the exhaust system of a space shuttle.

Behind a glossy red door at 56 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which slides open as on a starship, are a host of innovations, with Kawakubo’s various collections displayed in small, staggered niches — breaking the monotony of flicking through long rails of clothes.

None of Kawakubo’s racks line up, and that was exactly her goal.

“A voyage of discovery,” she said in an exclusive interview on Monday afternoon as workers scrubbed steel staircases and sales associates filled notches in the amoeba-like columns with perfectly folded knitwear, shiny handbags, perfumes and colorful wallets.

Shoppers navigate around clusters of white amoebas, following serpentine paths that don’t reveal their final destination. You won’t find many straight walls, nor even a speck of marble, in any of the gleaming white spaces.

“I wanted to make a shop where people can experiment, explore and discover rooms one by one,” Kawakubo said, her Japanese words translated to English by her husband Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International.

“I’m not convinced that people really are satisfied with shopping on the internet… I think the pleasure of shopping is finding things yourself,” she said, stressing that she considers the retail spaces at Comme des Garçons as important as the merch. “I wanted to make the spaces as interesting and as new as all the clothes that I make.”

The new location is roughly 50 percent bigger — and loads more visible — than the previous site, which had been tucked into a courtyard off the same tony thoroughfare for some 22 years.

The larger, street-front location shelters a host of lines that were previously only available at Comme des Garçons’ landmark Aoyama boutique in Tokyo, which was recently refurbished and doubled in size, and its flagship in New York City’s gallery-packed Chelsea district.

These include Comme des Garçons Girl and cashmere versions of the popular Play line. All of these “Aoyama specials” are demarcated with an underline on the labels.

The Paris boutique will also be the only place in the world to buy Comme des Garçons furniture, which has not been available on the market for more than 30 years. Three metal chair designs, first produced in 1987, have been re-edited and will be available in red for the first time. They retail from 3,000 euros to 3,800 euros.

Red is the featured color of the 7,500-square-foot unit. The walls backing the main staircase and the cash wrap are decked out in glossy red fiberglass, which Kawakubo described as a carryover from the previous location with its 160-foot-long undulating red fiberglass wave emanating from the ceiling and the walls.

Kawakubo said she can’t recall what initially inspired that boldly colored feature, but she had anointed red as “the new black” after a seminal scarlet collection back in 1988.

Comme des Garçons retains a small courtyard space opposite the previous boutique for one of its Pocket concepts, housing mainly its Play collection.

On Monday, Kawakubo invited a visitor outside to have a look at the facade of the store, formerly home to Burberry. All the checkered branding had been removed from around the large front windows, exposing steel backing that the designer left as is.

The chairs displayed behind the glass give no hint that this is a fashion boutique, consistent with Kawakubo’s aversion to something as banal as putting a dress in the window.

The designer said the amoeba-like fixtures were born of a wish to make “abstract furniture,” and move away from the straight walls, angular shelves and rectangular display cases found in most retail stores.

The Comme des Garçons Black collection is displayed amid curving, skeletal fixtures in raw plywood — also with deliberately misaligned racks. All the floors are concrete.

Kawakubo collaborates with a construction company, but designs all retail spaces herself, sketching out concepts on paper, and also building full-scale models of selling floors in Tokyo so she can experiment and fine-tune the volumes, perspectives and the customer journey.

Kawakubo said it was important to put her Paris flagship at the level of her Tokyo and New York flagships because “a lot of people with good eyes come to Paris.”

There is a large outdoor space emanating off the boutique’s second level that will in future house a café, serving mostly tea and cakes, according to Joffe.

The Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré offers a mix of art galleries, embassies, the Élysée Palace and the Bristol Hotel. However, there are still a number of prominent fashion nameplates, including the historic Hermès flagship, Brunello Cuccinelli, Lanvin, Roger Vivier, Tod’s, Bottega Veneta, Chanel and, coming soon, an Alaïa flagship.

Meanwhile, Kawakubo and Joffe plan to break the retail mold again when a Paris branch of Dover Street Market finally opens in March 2024 in the trendy and bustling Marais district.

It is slated to open in the grand 17th-century town house at 35-37 Rue des Francs Bourgeois that Joffe has operated for the past two years as a kind of cultural center hosting a freewheeling mix of exhibitions, happenings, musical performances, brand installations and retail spaces.