The Evolution of Comme des Garçons: Past, Present & Future
There are shops that one goes into to purchase something. And there are stores where you enter and touch something. Most people have not been to a Comme des Garcons place and the first time they enter the place are not really sure what they are witnessing. Is this fashion? Is this art? or Is this a dream? The solution is somehow all three. This is no coincidence. It has not been an accident. One woman and one brand have had the calculated, brilliant vision that has unspokenly redrawn the rules of what a retail space can be.
From Tokyo to the World: The Humble Beginnings of Comme des Garçons
The tale starts in 1969 in Tokyo, as a young woman by the name of Rei Kawakubo began a small clothing company with hardly more than a radical imagination and the utter rejection of trends. She called it Comme des Garcons, or French meaning, like the boys – a little linguistic defiance that foreshadowed everything the brand would eventually represent. During its first years, the label managed to live in silence in Japan, making a following of those who felt that something truly different was going on.
Then it was the year 1981, and the Paris show that stunned the fashion world. Kawakubo introduced collections, which were dubbed by critics as post-atomic and the end of fashion as we know it. Outfits were uneven, left unfinished, meant to be worn imperfectly. The spectators were not sure how to cheer or leave. Many did both. But something electric had come into the room, and those who touched it would never forget it. The ensuing stores were a continuation of that same philosophy – stores meant to leave you not so much to buy you a garment, but to shake you a bit so you could perceive the world in a new way.
Not Just a Store — A Living, Breathing Art Installation
What Comme des Garçons had realized sooner than virtually anybody was that the very store itself could make a statement. Back when the term experience was just a buzzword in the retail world, Kawakubo was creating spaces that made one pause, take a look, and challenge their assumptions. When entering a CDG store in the 1980s or 1990s, one would almost have felt like walking into a gallery where the clothes just happened to be on display – not vice versa.
The interiors were crude, factory-like and deliberate. No friendly, greetings gestures in an attempt to lure you into spending some money. In its place, there was space. Silence. Some premeditated discomfort that made everything seem all the more valuable. The brand knew something about people that is very human and that is, when you take away the noise, people will be listening more. And as they listen more attentively, they sense more. That emotional nature – that feeling of being actually touched by a shopping event – became the hallmark of all Comme de Garcon stores that would come.
Then there was Dover Street Market which was born in London in 2004. It was the most ambitious retail vision Kawakubo had made so far: a multi-brand multi-floor store that would unite the different lines of CDG with other designers that the brand had admired. It was a market-museum-social experiment. This idea proved to be a success that Dover Street Market later on extended to New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Los Angeles and Singapore. Every place is completely redesigned on a seasonal basis, so that every visit is truly unique. There is never a repeat visit to the same Dover Street Market.
Walking Into a Comme des Garçons Store Today: What Has Changed?
You can go into a Comme de Garcons flagship today, in Aoyama, Tokyo, or on Dover Street in London, or the labyrinth of Chelsea in New York and find that the spirit remains, although the world has changed completely. The stores are not willing to be banal. They still ask you something. Now there is, though, a kind of new consciousness, the perception that this brand has acquired its mythology in a 50-year span and that it has taken that history lightly.
The world distribution of the CDG stores is extraordinary of a brand that has never succumbed to expansion as a goal in itself. Tokyo, Paris, London, New York, Seoul, Beijing, each location is unique, formed by its surroundings and yet completely itself. No effort is made to develop a standardized experience. This is, perhaps, the most radical aspect of Commes des Garcons retail in the current form: in an age where brands are fixated on the values of consistency and visual identity rules, CDG continues to believe in following the gut over the rule.
Visitors to this day have been known to write about the experience emotionally. Something about the quietness of the spaces, the inexplicable arrangement of the clothes, the manner in which light passes through the rooms, makes a simple shopping experience something to be remembered. It is not by chance that feeling. The outcome of decades of consistent, slow, intransigent creative choice-making.
The Guerrilla Store Concept That Changed Retail Forever
During the same year that Dover Street Market was started in 2004, Comme des Garcons introduced what would be reverberated in the retail sector over the decades to come: the guerrilla store. The idea was straightforward and drastic in nature. The brand would also establish a temporary shop in an unlikely place; in an abandoned building, a forgotten neighborhood, a city where CDG had no permanent presence and operate it precisely one year before it would be closed permanently.
The earliest guerrilla store was set up in Berlin, in a place with no sign, little decoration and no effort to attract passing pedestrian traffic. You had to know. And, because you had to know, it was as though you were a part of something, walking through the door. The succeeding stores were located in Warsaw, Reykjavik, Ljubljana and other cities which the fashion industry had not paid much attention to. It was neither charity nor marketing, in the usual meaning of the words. It was a pure case of curiosity – a wish to see new people in new places under new conditions.
The concept of guerrilla stores was so influential that it was soon to be co-opted by brands with all price points. However, imitation never hit the nail on the head. The stores were effective as they were truly temporary, truly humble and truly experimental. They were not insta-popups meant to create Instagram content. They were still more rare, a brand that made less when it could have made more.
The Future of Comme des Garçons Stores: Bold, Brave & Unpredictable
It is impossible to know what Comme des Garcons will do next because it was meant to be so. Unpredictability is the most valuable asset of the brand. However, examining the trends of currents in fashion and retail more generally, there are some things that appear definite. The brand shall remain resistant to the push towards digital-first experiences despite all the other luxury houses scampering to create virtual showrooms and NFT collections. CDG has never been able to think that the body in space, the tangible, experiential reality of standing in a room, can be replaced.
Meanwhile, a wave of sustainability and physical retail discussion is happening in the brand, as online shopping trends are rapidly changing the form of shopping behaviour. The guerrilla store paradigm, with focusing on impermanence and intentionality, could be more topical than ever. A tired world could be prepared to have shops where you are asked to be slower, listen and appreciate what you are buying.
It appears to be more definite that whatever follows will be unexpected. Rei Kawakubo has devoted more than 50 years of her life to demonstrate that imagination is a better guide than market research. The stores will continue to evolve as the world continues to evolve and this brand has never thought that it could afford to sit still.
Why Comme des Garçons Still Feels Like a Revolution
Comme des Garçons is obstinately, lovingly itself, in a fashion world where brands are chasing trends, algorithms, viral content. The physical evidence of that is the stores. They do not attempt to make you at home. They attempt to get you to feel. And remind you with it that shopping, when it is done thoughtfully, thoughtfully, and with true creative spirit, can be a thing more than a purchase. It may be something that you remember ever since you were out of the building.
That is the actual heritage of Comme des Garcon retail. Not the guerrilla stores, which were brilliant as they were. Not Dover Street Market, as forward-thinking as it is. The heritage is the concept of the soul of a space. And that a brand who is ready to defend that soul, decade after decade, under all the temptations to sell it out, is doing something really uncommon in this world.
Final Thoughts
At its core, the development of Comme des Garcons stores can be viewed as the history of one vision that has been maintained over the course of its existence of over fifty years. In a tiny Tokyo shop to the experimental heights of Parisian style, in untamed industrial interiors, in the living, constantly evolving world of Dover Street Market, in guerrilla stores in forgotten suburbs, in flagships in the major cities of the world – all directions have been marked by the same challenge: what does this space make you feel? The future of Comme des Garçons retail is no cause of concern as long as the question leads to the decisions. Something to look forward to.
