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When Victoria Beckham’s flagship store first opened on Dover Street in 2014, it rubbed seams with another experimental emporium: Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe’s Dover Street Market, the punk-coded den of Comme-centred cool then occupying what had previously been the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In many respects, the two spaces shared some architectural tailoring: poured concrete floors, modern art, unconventional garment hangings better suited to a hip gallery installation than a retail outlet. However, Beckham’s store, designed by architect Farshid Moussavi and housed in a three-storey Georgian terrace, aimed for refinement rather than iconoclasm.
Cut on the bias from Brutalism and ‘modelled on the typology of a gallery’, the space was fabricated to produce the ‘sense of transience, unpredictability and exploration that underpins fashion’; it was ‘designed to be less like a market – where the focus is on choice – and more like a gallery where the focus is on display’. In centring a sensory experience rather than a transactional one, the store was more akin to Big Biba than its neighbour, Kensington Market (Kawakubo and Joffe’s inspiration for DSM). But like DSM, the flagship was also in its way a concept store, the concept being Victoria Beckham – chic with a disarming sense of self-awareness (the arty short film that advertised the store opening in 2014 intercut scenes of Victoria and a swan shaking its tail feathers).
Expense was not spared to execute this vision: cutaway floors, cast-lattice coffering, mirrored stainless-steel ceilings and counters, bottle-green glass changing cubicles, an industrial system of tracks and steel chains for garment hanging, folded-timber furniture, a Damien Hirst… At the opening, one attendee described the store as ‘a completely different take on a boutique: it doesn’t feel like a shop, it feels like an exhibition’.
Over the years, the store has continued to attract customers and admirers in equal measure; in 2016, Glenn Sestig Architects’ Belgian brut identity for Raf Simons at DSM would be cut from the same cloth – or, rather, concrete. But at the heart of fashion, of course, is the constant search for reinvention. Over the past few days, the store has undergone an aesthetic revamp. It’s the result of a collaboration between Victoria Beckham and gallerist/designer Rose Uniacke, which is only the latest convergence in a longstanding relationship (the inquisitive can glimpse Uniacke’s previous work across the fashion designer’s London home in the Beckham Netflix special). ‘We have developed an easy shorthand,’ says Uniacke. ‘It’s fun to explore new ideas with her.’
The new idea, in this instance, was a radical Christmas makeover. While the original material minimalism of the store – all polished concrete, glass and steel, with the odd bit of walnut joinery – articulated the concept of a modern gallery, Uniacke’s intervention more conjures a 19th-century European salon, entwining commerce with domesticity. ‘I wanted the visitor to move through the shop in the same way they might move through their own house,’ says Uniacke, describing the staging as giving the ‘sense of a glamorous party’. ‘There’s a chair with a jacket on it, and a pair of shoes left casually beside [them]…’ For Beckham, the transformation was ‘a joy’ to watch unfold. ‘Not only did [Rose] place every antique and piece of art meaningfully, but she really considered how our pieces could work in the space – from identifying the perfect colour palette to adjusting the lighting and re-merchandising the clothes in such a beautiful way.’
Uniacke’s vegetable-resin ‘Thyme’ paint – ‘a rich, fresh, verdant green with a hint of sunlight’ – alongside upholstery, curtains and soft furnishings in ‘Marsh’ linen-wool blend and ‘Bottle’ mohair velvet all form the lavish backdrop against which the Victoria Beckham collection (in Yule-invoking shades of mulled wine, brandy butter, white sugar and mistletoe) is offset. Uniacke, whose ‘love of furniture and finding its perfect placement’ arose from a background in antiques procurement, has also sourced a trove for the store’s new look, many pieces of which were recently on display at Frieze Masters.
Mid-20th-century Scandi furniture and Japanese vessels from the Shōwa era are positioned alongside a 19th-century Rococo-style console table and a South Italian bell krater from the fourth century BC decorated with dancing maenads and satyrs (the latter hinting at a thematic layer that summons Piranesi rather than Santa Claus). Hanging artworks by British Minimalist Bob Law have a Rothko-esque appeal, with their solid violet-black providing a further scenographic counterpoint to the clothes on display; in geometric artworks by Peter Collingwood constructed from textiles and stainless steel, meanwhile, one detects subtle echoes of the store’s former incarnation.
Indeed, there’s a whole skein of connecting threads here – between the pieces, and which tie this space with others: the reflective ceiling brings to mind, in miniature, Hardouin-Mansart’s hall of mirrors at Versailles or, perhaps, in it’s modernity, British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan’s mirrored Margate apartment; the Corbusian coffered ceiling (used, too, by Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi) pairs with a chair by Pierre Jeanneret originally created for the Modernist city of Chandigarh; the verdant velvets and walls give the feeling that one has climbed into the gloriously swathed state bed at Houghton Hall and drawn the green curtains…
Though somewhat more sombre in tone and less maximalist in execution, the store fit in some ways recalls Dries van Noten’s Parisian womenswear boutique, which opened in 2007 in a 17th-century town house on the Left Bank (WoI June 2007). Here, that ‘master of capturing a mood’ employed saffron drapes and mirrored panels as a backdrop, as well as an motley combination of furniture including a red-lacquered bridge table by Charles de Beistegui, a 1930s lunar lightbulb chandelier and an 18th-century tapestry stool with gilded Rococo feet.
One might say that these echoes are like the phantom thread that drives the hand of the seamstress, stitching together all these myriad themes. In the same way Moussavi reconfigured the interiors of a Georgian terrace ten years ago as an industrial-style gallery for a fashion display, this new look has reimagined the space as something else, adding another layer to its aesthetic history. And here lies the key to the most successful design, whether in the fields of fashion, interiors or architecture: set against a changing backdrop, the constant drive for reinvention.
Victoria Beckham, 36 Dover St, London W1. For more information, visit victoriabeckham.com
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