Water, water, everywhere, but not a thing to wear. That would best describe the scene at the opening of L.A.'s new
Comme des Garçons guerrilla store two Saturdays ago.
“All of our merchandise has been quarantined for inspection,” said Paris-based employee Christian Weinecke. “They don’t recognize our brand name, so it’s a rigorous process.”
Unable to feature items from any of the 12 different lines they will soon carry, store proprietors Brett Westfall and Tak Kato relied on the intricate design of the pop-up store itself for their debut. With bottles of Smart Water resting on exposed metal beams, a tower of shopping carts scraping the store’s 30-foot ceiling, and walls covered in intentionally cracked tile, the space felt more like an art installation than it did a clothing store. Empty hangers swung in the wind like tumbleweeds in a John Wayne Western.
The pop-up store, now open in Downtown L.A., is one of many Comme des Garçons has opened around the world, but it's the first in the U.S.
“Downtown is a great area because there’s so much potential and so much development going on. I think it’s only a matter of time before a new movement starts here. It’s like the antithesis of what everybody is doing on the Westside,” says Westfall. “This is a real collaboration between Comme des Garçons and local Los Angeles people.”
The notion of the guerrilla store is foreign to some, but when Comme des Garçons opened their first such outpost in Berlin in Feb. 2004, they merely replicated a local trend.
“Proprietors in Berlin went to spaces with an atmosphere they appreciated and they just left it the way it was,” Weinecke said. “They took over bombed-out ballrooms and hotels. We liked this idea very much and thought it was a very good fit for our brand.” Since then, they’ve opened 23 guerrilla stores, from Singapore to Warsaw to Athens, and they plan to open two more stores this year (in Düsseldorf and Hanoi).
It’s interesting that a brand known for rejecting a seasonal design outlook would wait so long to open in a city that rejects seasonal dressing, but later is better than never. The store will feature signature label items—jeans, T-shirts, wallets, perfume and cologne—as well as work by a rotating roster of local designers. And it will remain open for exactly 12 months.
Anyone who has seen some of Comme des Garçons’ more fantastic pieces in person knows that photographs rarely do them justice, so we recommend a visit. Located through a black iron gate next to Blends sneaker shop, it's not easy to spot, proving that good clothes really are hard to find—not to mention get through customs.
Marcos Luevanos is Style editor for Metromix Los Angeles.
