After praising Penhaligon’s, Georgia Barretta-Whiteley continues her search for the world's best shopper experiences with a visit to Hong Kong for some underground fashion.
Comme Des Garçons, 10 Ice House Street, Central Hong KongNow before you roll your eyes at the suggestion that Comme Des Garçon’s Rei Kawakubo sees herself as an anti-establishment fashion hero, posturing critically against the business that infact supports her, please take a moment to descend with me into her sartorial flagship store-slash-gallery. An outlet that is, quite literally, underground.Having pioneered the guerrilla store movement, Ms ‘Des Garçons’ has - in a city where large spaces arevery hard to find - managed the unthinkable and opened 4400 sq feet of subterranean digs in the heart of Hong Kong’s most prestigious commercial retail district.Thomas Crow, in ‘Modern Art in the Common Culture’ (1996), theorises that visual art (artistic avant-garde), is the R&D division of contemporary culture, aptly describing the process whereby the aesthetics and attitudes of contemporary art are digested into the commercial mainstream. Here it’s more like Kawakubo has knowingly skipped chewing, swallowed whole and exposed the glorious results, a collaborative petris dish of an underground incubator where “the essence of creation can be nurtured and grow stronger”.In doing so, she has couched the CdG retail experience within the artistic firmament that inspires her, elevating the store from homogeneous same-samity, and delivering brand-loyalty through design that’s challenging: not too far ahead to be polarising, and not so tight with NOW that it becomes familiar ‘retail noise’.
Clutching my own piece by the great woman herself, a boyish, bright green Comme’ wallet I’ve been losing and replacing for coming on 6 years, I descend. Alongside the separate exhibition space, the innovative interior redefines the boundaries of retail through curving walls and variations in ceiling height, dividing up the store from street level to basement. The result is a heightened experience of a meandering between the directional chinese artist Ai Wei-Wei’s porcelain watermelons and CdG matching t-shirts - only the latter was for sale at around 160 EUR, clearly price-positioned-up for the ‘limited edition’ trick.Just as CdG’s London-based Dover Street Market puts an entirely different spin on ‘concept store’, this soft-sell approach plays cleverly to the Hong Kong crowd who’ve come to appreciate slightly less mainstream and ultimately more considered fashion choices. The contemplative ‘gallery’ effect of CdG is a nice change from the numerous branded flagships you’ll see all over H.K once you do emerge from below.I love this. The stark-white spaces of Comme Des Garçons Hong Kong. Finally, a ‘dealer gallery’ where we can afford the stuff for sale inside. It might be just a green, pencil case looking wallet, but I’m saying the‘portfolio’ has begun.
Georgia Barretta-Whiteley is head of design at Saatchi & Saatchi X
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