Dover Street Market is celebrating two decades of ‘beautiful chaos’. Opening its doors in London's Mayfair in 2004, the radical concept store was founded by Comme des Garçon’s Rei Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe with a simple mission: to offer a shopping experience without definitions. Departments were intentionally mixed up, windows changed constantly, and visual arts institutions and creatives were invited to bring their subversive ideas into the space. Moving to the cavernous site in Haymarket below Piccadilly in 2016 – potentially an act of retail suicide that luckily paid off – while expanding to outposts in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and Paris, Dover Street Market has, over the years, come to represent so much more than a store. It's the beating heart of Comme des Garçons, a touchpoint for a global community of creatives, and an incubator for emerging design talent. Never sticking to convention and always evolving, it is above all a place where people can connect with one another and feel inspired.
Incredible displays have been a part of life at Dover Street Market since the beginning. In a practice linked to its Tachiagari turnover – where the store closes for a few days each season to be reimagined anew – everyone from Ai Weiwei to Karl Lagerfeld has been given free rein over the space. In efforts that have often kept staff working through the night, these interventions have seen Stephen Jones festoon hundreds of hats from the ceiling; artist Matt Clark sail a captainless boat through the window; and a huge wooden structure with positive aphorisms penned by Kawakubo, made in celebration of DSM’s tenth anniversary, which very nearly got vice president Dickon Bowden arrested by Westminster City Council. ‘Storytelling is not just one thing,’ says Joffe, when asked why these installations are a vital part of DSM’s world. ‘Experiences are better when deeper and wider.’
