Lorna is a business journalist with 11 years' experience writing about and commentating on the retail market. Lorna is an expert media commentator on retail, and she regularly speaks at and chairs international conferences. She has chaired panels at the World Retail Congress and most recently gave the WGSN trend seminar to 1,000 delegates in Brazil.
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London concept store Dover Street Market is a destination for international high fashion on any visit to the city. Its über-hip and trend-leading approach to visual merchandising, brand installations, artist and brand collaborations always makes it worth taking a look at.
This year, the store has cut Christmas up into chunks and worked with three separate brands and artists. Its main window, called Holiday explosion, is designed by Comme des Garcons and is linked to a range of gift products which use the same graphic and are on sale in the store.
In-store, the artist Graham Hudson has created an installation called “W1S 4LT (the store’s zipcode) 28112012 which is a collection of rubble scavenged from the streets surrounding the store. Hudson says of the work that “W1S 4LT 28112012”” is a portrait of the surrounding landscape, “the dreams of yesterday are marked for history as tomorrow is built upon the rubble of today”.
Elsewhere in the store, artist Andy Hillman has used oversize Christmas decorations such as baubles and striped candy canes to landmark iconic areas of the boutique’s in-store environment such as its in-store hut which is festooned with outsize silver baubles, giving it an otherworldly feel. But it is on the first floor and in the Rose bakery space, where he has used the giant size candy canes, that this technique has been particularly successful, providing a new and surreal architectural element to the space.
