
Rubber brains sealed in glass cabinets form the centrepiece of Japanese fashion designer Jun Takahashi’s installation at Dover Street Market, Comme des Garçons’ sprawling six-storey store in London.
Takahashi’s work, placed alongside racks of his Undercover clothing range, forms part of an overall cabinet-of-curiosities theme for the store’s biannual refurbishment. Victorian taxidermy co-exists alongside Marc Newson chairs and racks of sparsely hung clothes, with installations by, among others, Belgian artist Jan de Cock, Israeli designer Alber Elbaz for Paris fashion house Lanvin, and South African designer Carin Mansfield.
Commes des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo’s vision for the store was to create “a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter one another in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos.” Kawakubo overseas every aspect of the store’s refurbishment – a collaborative process creating an interplay between clothing collections and curated spaces.
The second cycle of the exhibition, opening on 9 October, will see Dover Street Market play host to 300 Artek chairs in an installation by Tom Dixon. Each chair will have a chip inserted that connects you to a website for information on the object’s history and allows new owners the opportunity to upload their own stories.
Images by Ed Reeve