Dover Street Market

Dover Street Market, the Comme des Garçons flagship and multi-brand boutique in London, perfectly sums up what I love and hate most about fashion. I never buy anything in there because the shopping experience is so poor for the price level (of which more later), but it's always interesting to wander around because the stock is brilliant.

It's like some sort of fashion museum, not least because even if you do want to buy something you probably won't be able to, because the staff will be far too busy talking to one another about their weekend plans. Look but, heavens above, don't touch too much or commit the cardinal sin of taking any photographs.

The pictures in this post are from their website. You would never get permission to take publicity photographs. In fact, Dover Street Market has held press days before now and invited journalists and editors explicitly to generate publicity, only to tell them that writing notes, let alone actually taking photos, is banned. It's all terribly fashion.

In the basement there's an area for the Comme des Garçons x Moncler 365 collaboration which is fantastic. The high performance Moncler puffer jackets are reworked into traditional couture shapes, or covered in a blurry forest print. The jackets all look so plump and well stuffed it's impossible to resist being drawn to them and touching them. Street wear brands like Supreme, Original Fake and Visvim are also represented in the basement. I was particularly drawn to the simple blue shirts by Visvim with a small leather patch on the chest, and the plain white t-shirts finished around the bottom hem with just the thinnest band of gaudy decorative trim, or with a small beaded area, not much larger than a postage stamp, just under the collar. The big street wear trend still seems to be for taking classic menswear staples and slightly altering or subverting them with quirky details. There is also an emphasis on high performance fabrics; some of the Visvim jackets were proudly bearing the Gore-Tex label, found more often in outdoors shops.

The ground floor is home to the bland but highly sellable Comme des Garçons wallets and logo-adorned Play line, as well as the Comme des Garçons fragrances which are, to say the least, something of an acquired taste. More interest is found at the back, where the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus range is displayed hanging from red scaffolding. A glass case full of bones and taxidermy, the 'favela' hut where the staff like to hide, and the fitting room styled after a Portaloo add visual interest to the raw exposed brick and concrete space. How meaningful that jackets costing over £1,000 and £400 shirts should be sold from an environment styled to look part construction site, part shanty town.

The main point of interest on the first floor is the Azzedine Alaïa zone which in effect serves as the designer's London store. A trio of austere mannequins show off some of Monsieur Alaïa's immaculately constructed, drop dead stylish creations, while a pair of imposing metal Marc Newson chairs provide stylish perches, presumably for those trying on Alaïa's towering shoes. The Comme des Garçons women's mainline and the cult Japanese street-luxe label Undercover are both housed on this floor too, as is the large Comme des Garçons SHIRT area.

I was particuarly taken by a CDG SHIRT t-shirt which seemed to be constructed from portions of three different t-shirts, dissected and then sewn back together with the seams on the outside, creating a three dimensional pleated effect. Another brilliant shirt consisted of a patchwork of different coloured checks, all on black backgrounds, which almost created an optical illusion effect when sewn together thanks to the mismatched colours and patterns going in all different directions. Some simple button down poplin shirts had been given the Comme treatment by having a collage of different checked and textured fabrics sewn onto the front, like some sort of plaid mash-up bib.

This season Raf Simons is sad omission from the second floor (his collection apparently didn't fit with the "vibe" of the floor, but should be back next season), but Celine, Gareth Pugh, Haider Ackermann and Thom Browne are well represented. The bizarre World Archive corner, with tribal headgear and embellished garments at mind blowing prices, remains as puzzling as ever.

The third floor plays host to Lanvin, Anne Valerie Hash, Erdem, Giambattista Valli, Nina Ricci, Marios Schwab, Stephen Jones and Rodarte, among others, but the personal highlight for me is the Hussein Chalayan corner styled to look like a desert. Among all of the shop's bizarre and sometimes ill-conceived design statements, this somehow stands out as the most successful.

On the fourth floor, there are more Comme des Garçons lines. In total, Dover Street Market sells 17 different CDG ranges. By the time you reach the top floor, they start to have increasingly bizarre names like "Comme des Garçons Comme des Garçons" which is quite different, you must understand, from merely "Comme des Garçons." Behind a 'hardware stall', selling (or possibly not selling) such as things as fly swats, storm lanterns and balls of string, is the Rose Bakery where you can get a pot of green tea, served with a big dose of attitude, for about £6.

The problem with Dover Street Market is that many of the staff are hapless, rude and self obsessed, or at least they do a very good impression of embodying the three. Generally I love the store design and the madness, but it never really strikes me as a luxury store in which you could justify spending the top end prices which they charge. Somehow the shopping environment just isn't comfortable, or conductive to spending top dollar. The fitting rooms are cramped and awkward, the lighting is harsh, and if you do actually buy something they stuff it unceremoniously in a transparent plastic bag. Perhaps treating your new £2,000 jacket as some sort of everyday commodity is all part of the concept, but when a lot of boutiques offer comfortable seating, staff who are keen to serve, sometimes even complimentary drinks, and beautiful packaging, Dover Street Market just doesn't quite cut it.