Dover Street Market is an extremely creative and forward-looking concept store. You can tell it from the shop windows, which appear so subliminal and imaginative that you feel like taking a look a bit further, attracted by the coming and going of very trendy shop assistants crowding the ground floor one hour before the opening, smiling and waiting for the usual morning meeting on products. When you enter the store, you immediately breathe a very refined and international atmosphere. I am indeed enchanted before the boxes of precious jewels, the variety of fragrances, the vintage glasses window and the spicy-nuanced jackets, which are so velvety and tailored that they perfectly fit as soon as you wear them. However, it is when I get to the t-shirt vending machine that I feel excited. Yes, it is not a misunderstanding, it is a vending machine emerging between one corner and another, containing very colourful t-shirts, individually packed and signed by the Dover Street Market’s iconic brand. Among these, the one that unexpectedly captures my attention is a simple man’s black t-shirt displaying the purchase philosophy of the famous creator of the four-storey market, the well-knownComme de Garcones’ designer, Rei Kawakubo. It is definitely not a marketing message: the one on theComme des Garcons Shirt is indeed an actual programme of free creativity, an exercise of open-minded attitude, an act of love for progress. All this is delicately snapshotted on a minimal t-shirt displaying the following:
“I dream of a world where people can be truly free to create, to sell and to wear. We need something new in order to progress. We need creation to exercise and liberate mind”.
