At the centre of cult streetwear label Aries’ new London store – a raw, gallery-like space with exposed concrete walls and vast 4,000 sq m floor space on Soho’s Great Pulteney Street – is a staircase, leading shoppers down into the basement below. From afar, it looks constructed entirely from scaffolding; come closer, and each one of the steps is actually made from a different type of marble, sleek and polished. The use of the material, says Sofia Prantera – the British brand’s Italian-born founder – was inspired by the work of modernist architect Carlo Scarpa in Venice, as well as the collages of marble seen across city’s squares and churches.
‘It’s the idea of the temple and the rat,’ she smiles, a reference to Fergus Purcell’s graphics for the brand – Roman-style columns that surround the Aries logo, and a rat motif that reappears across collections. Prantera says the concept encapsulates the way the brand straddles the worlds of luxury design and streetwear (Purcell co-founded Aries with Prantera in 2012, having previously designed Palace’s ‘Penrose’ triangle). ‘The marble is very designed, it’s very high end, it’s the temple,’ she says, providing an opposition to the industrial feel of the staircase’s construction (initially, they wanted to use real scaffolding, though for safety it is now made from welded metal). ‘[Since the beginning], our identity is all about this duality – the elevated temple and the decay of the rat.’
