Dover Street Market London

Dover Street Market London was opened in September 2004 on Dover Street, Mayfair by Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe (the founder of Comme des Garçons and her husband, the company's president) as a multi-brand concept store designed around what they described as 'beautiful chaos.' The store was conceived as a deliberate inversion of department-store retail orthodoxy: brand-installations rather than brand-counters, raw architectural finishes, freight-elevator circulation, and a buyer-led mix that combined Comme des Garçons' own lines with carefully chosen external brands. The Dover Street Market London vocabulary settled around several distinguishing practices: an upper-floor Comme des Garçons section anchoring the building, brand installation spaces (Junya Watanabe, Sacai, Undercover, Visvim, JW Anderson, Off-White, Supreme, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Heron Preston, A-Cold-Wall*) that change seasonally with installation art, the Rose Bakery café (originally on the top floor of the Dover Street building), and a tightly curated stationery, art-book, and accessories section. The London store relocated in 2016 from Dover Street to Haymarket, in a former Burberry HQ on Orange Street. Dover Street Market London is owned by Comme des Garçons Co. Ltd. The DSM concept now operates in London (Haymarket), Tokyo (Ginza, opened 2012), New York (Lexington Avenue, opened 2013), Beijing (Dover Street Market Beijing, opened 2019), Singapore (DSMS, opened 2017), Los Angeles (Sunset Boulevard, opened 2018), and Paris (DSMP at Rue Elzévir in the Marais, opened 2024). Few retailers of the post-2000 period have built such a globally legible installation-anchored multi-brand store concept.