Retail Forecast: The Style Aristocracy
The age of the shopping mall is truly over.
The ready availability of design and fashion information from the internet has created an aristocracy of style. Today’s designer customer sees themselves less as a consumer of defined design taste and more of a stylist. Gone is the idea that the customer with means and a taste for high style would ever want to be a follower of fashion or design. Rather, that person has an educated eye for design and fashion, and puts together elements of designer collections which express their own personal sense of style. We live in a new era of consumers with a sophisticated knowledge of the design and fashion world.
This point was brought to mind when I was looking through photos of the new Miami Dior shop. It’s a freestanding store, and the Paris architectural firm Barbarito-Bancel was commissioned to design a façade for the store. The interiors are by Peter Marino. The architects created a façade of folded planes, all white, which lift and move in and out of the exterior walls of the store to form a sculptural play of light both inside and outside. There are glimpses of the store interior from outside, and the wall architecture forms a striking backdrop for the exterior spaces of the store itself.
This luxury store is in an area surrounded by other freestanding stores, and the streetscape is one of other designer stores whose Facades are interpretations of each store’s esthetic or, like Dior, an effort to make the building itself stand out as a design piece. Mall architecture, by contrast, dictated that the store facades and entries all conform in some way to the design standards of the mall architecture. There was a forced uniformity to the enfilade of store windows and doors. Not so with the Miami design district. Here there’s no sense that the individual store design is required to meet anything other than city building codes. There is much greater variety. Each store stands on its own and has its own architectural voice on the street.
As a result, the customer in Miami has the experience of going from one full expression of a designer environment to another, choosing like a stylist which elements of each designer’s offering aligns with his or her personal style. There’s no personal shopper pulling from designer boutiques in a store, no store buyer standing between this new retail customer and the runway show. Each store can tell its own unique story, and the more memorable the better. That’s what the Dior façade helps to do. So our experience of the store architecture is one of architecture that engages us and not a box full of merchandise or some chain store grab bag of design clichés which are supposed to spell “Dior” in our minds.
What has prompted this change?. Online shopping has trained the savvy customer to cherry pick what appeals to their personal style. When they can see an entire collection online, often at the time of the runway presentation, they have a front row seat as a buyer. Often there is a level of perception about what makes the style of a designer or architect which previously was only possible with a professional. Rules have changed and stores like Dior reflect these changes.
Read the original article: “barbarito bancel merges haute couture + architecture in dior’s miami boutique façade”
Photo courtesy of Alessandra Chemollo via designboom
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