Sign up to our newsletter for a truly global perspective on the fashion industry. Enter your email to receive editorial updates, special offers and breaking news alerts from Vogue Business. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please see our privacy policy for more information. This article is part of our new editorial package, The Future of Shopping, in which we predict how the retail landscape will be shaped over the next decade.
Click here to read more. Our strategy is having no strategy. When Joffe makes his declaration, she registers an expression of fleeting — yet unmistakable — surprise.
For Coffey and her colleagues, rules abound — and they must follow a precisely defined strategy in order to meet them. Now in — just as the multi-brand wholesale model seems at its lowest possible ebb — Joffe and Kawakubo are poised to open a venture that not only encapsulates everything they have learnt over the past 20 years, but which also reflects their instincts about the future evolution of retail.
It has been designed by Kawakubo so that passers-by on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois cannot see the shop floor inside. Although four major luxury brands will be represented when DSM Paris opens — Prada, Balenciaga, Miu Miu and Bottega Veneta — none will be granted their own self-designed concession space. Because some of them wanted their own space.
(mh=OprvedI6CjTyePc6)0.jpg "Teen girls in Dover")
And a lot of them are stopping wholesale. During our visit a further, smaller, area in the basement has been furnished with a bed, cupboard and workbench: this, says Joffe, will be the site of a special opening pop-up by Matty Bovan , during which the brilliant York-based designer will craft his unique pieces in a sort of fashion equivalent of a Marina Abramovic installation.
