On Friday, July 24, Gucci and Dover Street Market announced their first collaboration. Alessandro Michele, Gucci Creative Director, will launch his first collections – Fall Winter 2015-16 and Cruise 2016 – in Dover Street Market locations in Tokyo, New York, London and Beijing.
The first city to receive this collaboration was appropriately Tokyo on July 25th with the opening of a dedicated Gucci shop-in-shop at Dover Street Market in Ginza, the home of Dover Street Market founder Rei Kawakubo. Similar spaces at Dover Street Market New York and Dover Street Market London will open on September 10th in light of the cities’ Fashion Weeks. The new Dover Street Market Beijing will open this fall.
To personalize the new Gucci spaces, Michele has taken inspiration from the urban setting of the Fall Winter 2015-16 Gucci fashion shows (for instance, concrete panels, an old-rose pink carpet, an armchair in vibrant cherry red velvet, metal rolling racks, and velvet screen partitions). For the arrival of the first Cruise collection, Michele will reimagine the shop.
Marco Bizzarri, Gucci President and CEO, expressed his enthusiasm regarding Dover Street Market’s idea of this global collaboration: “There are few contemporary retail backdrops for fashion in the world today other than those found at DSM, which makes these locations the ideal venues for Alessandro Michele’s collections. Building unique and exciting collaborations with selected specialty stores is a new page at Gucci…The brand is becoming more intriguing and fashion forward.”
Adrian Joffe, President of Dover Street Market, also commented: “For a company like Gucci to do this was for me pretty astounding and on top of that we loved the collections. They have that wonderful combination of new and traditional as well as being conceptually authentic. We are very proud and honored to be part of the Gucci revolution.”
–Christina Como