Why it belongs in ORBIS
Rei Kawakubo’s beautiful chaos — the concept store where Comme, streetwear and couture collide. Left Dover Street March 2016 after landlord tripled the rent. Haymarket store 31384 sq ft on five floors, three times the old unit. 17-18 Dover Street housed the ICA from 1950.
Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and her husband Adrian Joffe opened Dover Street Market in London in 2004, naming it for its first address and organizing it around her phrase 'beautiful chaos': a multi-floor market where the world's most conceptual fashion — all Comme des Garçons lines, Sacai, Simone Rocha, streetwear installations, emerging names — shares space in artist-built environments that are demolished and rebuilt seasonally in the ritual of tachiagari. The London store later moved to Haymarket, and the market spread to New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Paris, each edition curated as an argument rather than an inventory. DSM functions as fashion's most influential retail edit: placement here anoints young designers. Go without a shopping list — the point is the collision of things, and the exclusive collaborations produced for the store are the collectors' quarry.
Visit early in a season drop for the store-exclusive pieces, and take the floors in order — the installations are sequenced, and rushing them misses the argument.