The Broken Arm

The Broken Arm was founded in 2013 in Paris by Anaïs Lafarge, Guillaume Steinmetz, and Romain Joste as a multi-brand luxury concept space at 12 Rue Perrée in the Haut-Marais district, specifically focused on what the founders described as 'a deliberately editorial-anchored alternative to traditional luxury-multi-brand-store retail.' The brand's foundational thesis was specific: build a Paris luxury-concept space that combined a tightly-curated multi-brand boutique with a sit-down café-and-restaurant operation, conceived as a single editorial destination for the Paris luxury-customer creative-class. The Broken Arm vocabulary settled around several distinguishing things: a buyer-led brand list anchored to contemporary independent luxury and emerging designers (Acne Studios, Cecilie Bahnsen, Comme des Garçons, JW Anderson, Jacquemus, Kiko Kostadinov, Marni, Off-White, Wales Bonner, Wooyoungmi, plus a particularly strong selection of Japanese-and-Korean emerging designers), the iconic Broken Arm Café-and-Restaurant on the ground floor (a destination breakfast-lunch-coffee operation that has become a defining cultural address of the Haut-Marais creative-class), the long-running Broken Arm Editions in-house publishing and content programme, and a continuous run of seasonal Broken Arm × brand-exclusive collaboration capsules. The brand is independent and held by Lafarge, Steinmetz, and Joste. The Broken Arm operates the single Rue Perrée flagship plus a substantial e-commerce platform serving Europe and selected international markets. The retailer has been one of the defining post-2013 Parisian-anchored multi-brand concept stores, with the editorial-café-and-restaurant integrated retail format specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'experiential-luxury-retail' conversation that has been continuously rewritten in Paris since 2015.