It hasn’t been a fruitful past few months for indie fashion labels. The Vampire’s Wife and Mara Hoffman announced their brands would shutter, online distributor MatchesFashion went into administration, and Farfetch narrowly avoided collapse by selling to South Korean e-commerce mainstay Coupang. When making it in fashion feels impossible given increasingly precarious economic conditions that are causing even celebrity-favorite designers like Elena Velez to narrowly escape the red, it may seem counterintuitive that Dover Street Market would open a Paris emporium chock full of indie brands. The Comme des Garçons–owned retailer is betting on the city’s stylish Marais district—and founder Rei Kawakubo’s idiosyncratic approach that has created a growing fleet of successful outposts in New York City, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Beijing.
Browsing through Dover Street Market is meant to elicit feelings of mystery and discovery. That’s no different in Paris, where Kawakubo eschewed window displays and branded spaces altogether in favor of placing all products behind glossy white curved alcoves that seem straight out of a sci-fi flick. Merchandise is mixed together regardless of price—hand-distressed Comme des Garçons blazers neighbor stacks of reasonably priced T-shirts and an array of indie brands like runway upstarts Weinsanto and Vaquera. “My ideal is that people search for, discover, and then choose the clothes they want to wear,” Kawakubo once said, “having thought about it and felt something by themselves, on their own.” That may also explain why luxury mainstays Prada, Bottega Veneta, and Balenciaga, which usually shun wholesale, are all in stock, further reinforcing Dover Street’s cool factor.
