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“For us, the rule is that there are no rules. Our strategy is having no strategy.” So says Adrian Joffe as we tour the new, and not-quite-yet-finished, Dover Street Market Paris. Alongside us is Kate Coffey, who is director of the long-awaited, permanent Parisian outpost of Dover Street Market (DSM). When Joffe makes his declaration, she registers an expression of fleeting — yet unmistakable — surprise.
That's likely because Coffey's colleague, COO Remo Hallauer, has been tasked with a very precise, regulated and extremely complicated brief: to ensure that the approximate 1,700 square metres of commercial space across three floors of the Hôtel de Coulanges are finished to the exacting specifications of Joffe, and his wife and partner Rei Kawakubo, before DSM Paris opens to the public, (probably) next month. Then there are the demands of the préfecture (or prefect), which has rightly imposed stringent demands relating to both heritage and safety upon this new incarnation of the magnificent 1634-built hotel en particulier. For Coffey and her colleagues, rules abound — and they must follow a precisely defined strategy in order to meet them.
Yet, while not literally true, Joffe’s opening statement of apparent anarchy reflects the deeper credo that drives his and Kawakubo’s approach to Dover Street Market — an approach that has made it by far the most highly regarded, independent fashion retailer in the world. Since opening the original store on London’s Dover Street in 2004 (a location since moved to Haymarket), the founding couple has expanded its network to include Tokyo, New York, Beijing, Los Angeles and Singapore. There has been a beauty-only DSM store on Rue Elzévir, just down the road from us in the Marais, since 2019. Now in 2024 — just as the multi-brand wholesale model seems at its lowest possible ebb — Joffe and Kawakubo are poised to open a venture that not only encapsulates everything they have learnt over the past 20 years, but which also reflects their instincts about the future evolution of retail.
Many conventional retail ‘rules’ will be flouted in the new DSM Paris. It has been designed by Kawakubo so that passers-by on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois cannot see the shop floor inside. The retail areas are all contained within curved white-walled zones placed within the hotel’s rooms. “None of anything we’ve installed touches the side of the building. They are like spaceships that have landed without affecting the surrounding space,” explains Joffe. The areas between these “spaceships” and the existing walls (and windows) can be used for installations, book signings and displays.
Another important evolution is that Kawakubo’s agency is total. Although four major luxury brands will be represented when DSM Paris opens — Prada, Balenciaga, Miu Miu and Bottega Veneta — none will be granted their own self-designed concession space. “And everything will be mixed up, so it’s very egalitarian,” says Joffe. “When I approached the brands I wanted of that ilk, not all of them agreed. Because some of them wanted their own space. And a lot of them are stopping wholesale.”
Those four progressive luxury houses, however, did believe in Joffe’s “no rules” strategy. His deployment of that strategy is further reflected in the hotel’s cavernous vaulted basement which, as well as further retail zones defined by scaffolding-mounted rails, contains a huge and versatile studio space. This area, provisionally christened ‘The Helix’, will be thrown open for “concerts, raves, shows, conferences, yoga — everything”, says Joffe. When DSM Paris opens, it will host a special Kawakubo-masterminded exhibition that will also be installed in the hotel’s cobbled courtyard. During our visit a further, smaller, area in the basement has been furnished with a bed, cupboard and workbench: this, says Joffe, will be the site of a special opening pop-up by Matty Bovan, during which the brilliant York-based designer will craft his unique pieces in a sort of fashion equivalent of a Marina Abramovic installation.
Joffe leads me to the back of the building, where DSM Paris’s visitors will be able to linger and chill on the outside terrace of an in-store branch of Rose Bakery. We contemplate the carefully tended, silver birch and bamboo-filled public garden that adjoins it. I observe that in today’s fashion retail landscape, the sudden withering of once-mighty online platforms — Farfetch, Matches, and more — has come as a surprise to some. Joffe is not one of them.
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He says: “Bricks and mortar has always been crucial to us. Rei has always said that. For her, online is the anathema. Because when she designs she imagines that end[point]: when the customer comes into the store, feels the fabric, tries on the clothes. This is part of the beginning of her creating.”
Joffe and Kawakubo are not anti-etail, per se. “We understand the service pros of online. But nothing can ever replace that human touch. Within the shop [Rei] talks about not making it too easy for the client, but of guiding them to follow paths of discovery to discover things that have been hidden. Because discovery is what’s exciting about shopping,” says Joffe. Stimulating that potential for discovery is the motive for DSM Paris’s obscured windows, its maze of “spaceships”, its wilful mix of categories and brands, plus its plethora of nooks dedicated to a shifting programme of transient installations. “It’s exactly about giving the customer more agency, and not underestimating their intelligence,” emphasises Joffe. He then divulges that there will be a new online venture attached to the opening of DSM Paris. Detail-wise, I’m sworn to secrecy for now — though the function is almost antithetical to conventional e-tailing.
The couple’s experiments in counter-cultural “no rules” retail began at a noodle bar in mid-’90s Berlin. During their visit, they had admired the squatter locations scattered about the liberated east side of the city. Spaces such as Tacheles were being used by artists, designers, musicians and party people alike. “So we said, ‘Why don’t we get one of these places really cheap, get somebody who has nothing to do with fashion, and give them all our stock?’ Because what’s the point of it being in our warehouse when we can give it to somebody to try and sell it?” There were eventually 37 of these curated Comme Des Garçons ‘Guerilla’ shops across the world — each of which cost less than $1000 to fit out, and stayed operating for under a year.
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Thirty years on, Dover Street Market Paris bears a direct lineage to that original guerilla instinct. When it opens, the retail space will represent the final piece in a larger jigsaw. The top two floors of the Hôtel de Coulanges have since 2020 been home to DSM’s brand development showrooms. This is where DSM partners with a roster of Joffe-scouted brands including Erl, Vaquera, Honey Fucking Dijon, Sky High Farm and Olly Shinder. DSM offers its partner brands services running from manufacturing (through partner factories) to management to sales and distribution. According to Joffe, around 10 per cent of the new downstairs offering will be drawn from its partners.
Joffe says: “The first criteria when choosing who to work with is that I like them as people. And the second is that we believe they have potential.” He continues: “You know people say we help young brands, but they help us too. It’s a two-way street that benefits both sides — that’s the only way it can work.”
There seems to be a fascinating apparent paradox at the heart of Joffe and Kawakubo’s approach to DSM’s operations: they are precisely designed to allow for the imprecision of spontaneity and creative chaos. And while a multi-brand retailer is, on the face of it, fashion’s most horizontal of mechanisms — a single-sales entity that relies on multiple client partners in order to function — DSM also in many ways operates vertically. The result is a retail philosophy of curated collectivism whose pattern is less straightforwardly horizontal or vertical than it is a helix: a constantly evolving entity.
Or as Joffe puts it, “It’s inherent in the nature of community. No one is in isolation, and everything depends on everything else. Plus, everything is always changing. The synergy that results from two things coming together is always bigger than the sum of the two parts. This is what we’ve always believed.” And with that, he straightens his cap and readies himself for the next meeting.
Correction: This article was updated to clarify COO Remo Hallauer's role in the new store (15/4/24).
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