What You Need to Know About Dover Street Market

Beautiful chaos. That’s how Adrian Joffe describes Dover Street Market, the radical retail space he and his wife, Rei Kawakubo, founded in London more than a decade ago. And in many ways it also sums up the anarchic, glorious, imaginative and messy fashion aesthetic of the British capital, a place that has been defining trends since the 1960s.

The store was launched on Mayfair’s Dover Street but moved earlier this year to a shiny new location just off Piccadilly Circus—a space three times the size of the original. It also has outposts in Tokyo, Beijing and New York, but despite its exponential growth in recent years, DSM, as it’s known to Londoners, remains true to its avant-garde roots.

Inspired by the defunct Kensington Market, where industry-changing careers were launched in the 1960s and ’70s, DSM has long adhered to the concept that designers should be free to market their wares in an imaginative, original way and that fashion should be celebrated alongside art installations and audacious pop-ups. Think walls of mixtapes, old Nokia phones and copies of The Face at Paul Smith, green velvet mannequins at Gucci and bright pink children’s slides covered in handbags at JW Anderson. It doesn’t hurt that Joffe and Kawakubo are respectively the president and creative director of the unconventional cult fashion brand Comme des Garçons, and their distinctive aesthetic is stamped all over the place.

“We wanted to create a new kind of retail experience, a kind of store that never existed before,” says Joffe. “We wanted somewhere that ignored all the preconceived notions of how a store should be, that dismissed the established rules of retail, that offered the customer a new and stimulating shopping experience that raised the spirits and excited the senses.”  And the result is the most inventive, creative department store you’ve probably ever been to—think Selfridges if it was dropped in east Hackney, or Lane Crawford in the hands of Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood.

Photo courtesy of Dover Soul Market

“The initial concept was one of sharing a space in a market kind of atmosphere,” says Joffe. “We wanted to bring together all kinds of creative people who had a vision and something to say. It’s the very essence of the idea of beautiful chaos that is the pillar of DSM. The list of people we are proud to share our space with is endless.” Brands stocked at DSM range from established names such as Céline, Alaïa, Loewe and Gucci to younger labels like Vetements, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Molly Goddard and Craig Green—all of which sit side by side and are distributed evenly across the four floors. And then, of course, there are all the Comme des Garçons brands, which take up a good chunk of the particularly trendy basement area.

However, if there’s one thing guaranteed to rein in creativity it’s a lack of space, which is why Dover Street Market moved from its eponymous home to Haymarket Street in March this year. “The extra space means we can explore more opportunities with brands and expand our vision,” says Joffe. “The new store is a grade II listed building—it was built in 1912 as the original headquarters of Burberry—and so aesthetically different to our original space. It is also nearly three times larger. The size was important for us, but also the feeling, history and design of the building were crucial factors.”

One happy outcome from the recent move is the impressive expansion of the jewellery section. Once a single cabinet on the ground floor in Dover Street, it now takes up a good third of the ground floor in Haymarket and is packed with expertly curated, contemporary pieces that all sit somewhere between unusual and outrageous. There is row upon row of distinctive ear cuffs, shoulder-grazing earrings, shield-like necklaces, clever pendants and glorious knuckle-duster rings. If you’re looking for a piece of jewellery that will get noticed every time you wear it, this is the place to find it. The wares are displayed in vintage glass-topped cabinets and are devoid of obvious branding, so your choice is made by design rather than a particular brand’s reputation. Prices range from £80 for a pair of stud earrings to £39,000 for a gem-encrusted bracelet, which means these cabinets have become a magnet for an unusually wide variety of fashion-forward Londoners.

“A lot of what we chose—and we still do this—is by gut instinct, and it was a little bit like opening Pandora’s box,” says DSM vice-president Dickon Bowden. “We found this whole other world of amazing designers who didn’t really have anywhere to present their work. We try to present in a simple yet visually interesting way within an informal environment that encourages discovery.”

Bowden and his team travel to the JCK Las Vegas jewellery fair each year to scout for new talent, but most collaborations come through word of mouth or introductions by Joffe and Kawakubo to young jewellery makers unable to find representation in London’s more traditional department stores. “Dover Street Market is the opposite of the mostly staid and antiquated environments of traditional jewellery outlets. People are challenged when they come, and ultimately find things. The sole criterion is that the design has something to say. People come here to find something exceptional,” says Bowden. The problem isn’t finding something exceptional, though: it’s deciding which of so many extraordinary pieces to take home.