The burnished silver stainless-steel sign at the bottom of the Dover Street Market is unerringly businesslike- the names of the brands on each floor written in businesslike, doctor’s office black. They act as pornography to certain members of the public, and in such sexless fonts too. “3F: Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, Alexis Mabile, Anne Valerie Hash…” it’s even in alphabetical order! “2F: Adam Kimmel, Arts and Science…” to the untrained eye the sign could be describing a pediatrician’s office and some fusty old, government-funded office dealing with arts and science. Yet this is the unassuming entrance to the Dover Street Market, favorite store of the avant garde and fabulously-well-to-do-starving rich.

The Dover Street Market is essentially an emporium of several floors selling goods at several times the price that they should be sold at. I encountered it early on in London- the first day I arrived on my flight, existing on a supply of adrenaline and Berocca. The building itself is situated in that part of London where all the buildings look more or less the same: old and projecting a feeling of vintage wine spread over stone tablecloth at sunrise. I’d already passed by it about twice without knowing it was The Dover Street Market, and even when we were on our way there we had to doubletake, make sure it was the right place.

Our gallery of rogues at this point consisted of myself, Tavi, and Laia- the fourth member of this troupe was to arrive the next morning- Elizabeth. We walked around the Dover Street Market (which I’m going to refer to as “DSM” from now on because it’s quite a mouthful, and I can’t be bothered typing it out in full all the time) in a half-dazed haze. Walking around the Comme des Garcons “Black” store first- a glass edifice of white polka dots and clothes that sort of represent what Comme des Garcons is about without being too specific. They’re Comme des Garcons in a very vague manner. The whole idea of “Comme des Garcons Black” is to make Comme des Garcons affordable to the “public” without making the clothes look like traditional, half-rate-discounted, thrift-store clothing for a funeral (as per Comme des Garcons H&M). It’s a pity the jacket I tried on was one thousand pounds. The jacket itself was all black and embossed with sticking-out polka dots like a fabric ream of bubble wrap. It wasn’t worth one thousand pounds, even if the salesman was incredibly nice; a rarity compared to the rest of the staff there. I recall one man, pretentiously dressed probably, informing Tavi and I that we were not allowed to take photographs inside the Dover Street Market (we’d already taken photos on another floor anyway, and the one-man-band staffing it didn’t care.)

The females at the DSM (I should mention here that the DSM is owned by Rei Kawakubo, who owns Comme des Garcons- it’s an elegant hodgepodge of labels she controls and labels she likes) all look like the previously stated Ms. Kawakubo. Their haircuts are all uniformly cut- bangs and down to their shoulder hair. If they are not Japanese they look like it. I saw exactly one smile from all of these female assistants, and the image- calculated and deliberate, no doubt, that Comme des Garcons projects of Rei Kawakubo is of someone who very rarely smiles. I imagine that this Kawakubo-clone depot is actually a perverse joke of the real Ms. Kawakubo’s. I imagine she sits in her office grinning madly at the prospect of customers going “is that Rei Kawakubo?!” whilst traveling through the DSM. (Or at least I like to think that.)

One of the Rei clones end up being fairly pleasant and un-Rei-like. She acts like a pleasant shop assistant (and not a sycophantic one):

“Did you see that girl around here? The short one-”
“I think she was trying on something! In that one over there”
“Oh, I thought so”

Rei-clone One actually said that “something” with an exclamation mark at the end. As in a Pokemon game, or a children’s television show. “I think you might find it in the neighboring town!” written out in white pixelated text on a black background. If she were an animation, she’d be smiling that smile that can only be found in an animation, where the smile can only be represented by only one line. She wasn’t Rei Kawakubo I realized with a slightly disappointed internal sigh. I don’t know what I was expecting, because I know she wasn’t Rei Kawakubo- she was too tall and elongated, for one. And yet I wanted her to act like Rei Kawakubo, in some way. It’s like going to see an Elvis impersonator and the impersonator speaking to you in a hoity-toity upper-class British accent. Of course, their job is to walk around looking stylish and occasionally sell things; not do whatever a Rei Kawakubo impersonator’s meant to do- they sure don’t sing “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Houndog.”

At one point we’re on perhaps the second floor and Tavi’s trying on something by Junya Watanabe. Trying to try it on, anyway. She ends up not knowing how to put it on, and nobody else seems to either. It’s white, twisted, and pleated. It is probably a dress of some description, though who the hell knows anyway- if anything, it’s a Pretty Object. This is what the DSM is filled with: Pretty Objects. Objects that sparkle, that glitter, that are warped and confusing yet beautiful.

Actually, it’s less of Pretty Objects and more of Pretty Dreams. On one of the floors there’s a dressing room akin to the middle part of a carousel, in another a seemingly broken door leads to another changing room. The doors strike me as being more important than the actual clothes being sold. The whole…mise en scene of the shop being more important than the clothes.

I hope I’m not sounding too negative here, because I love the Dover Street Market. I love the Dover Street Market almost as much as a loath tumblr. And I’ve really been loathing tumblr as of late, even as I continue to post images that’ll soon be forgotten by the people that “follow” me, and quotes that’ll probably be only remembered by I and my sweetheart. I’ve identified three main traits of the “tumblr” using teenage girl (which I am not, but most of the people I know who use tumblr are. I’ve yet to see a suit-wearing businessman use tumblr*). These traits are:
Number one: Posting pictures of half-naked or totally naked models in something tangentially related to fashion (I call this “fashion porn”).
Number two: Pictures of Bob Dylan.
Number three: Pictures of cute things (ie. Kittens), or quotes- generally hormonal and soppy only in the way a teenage girl who reads Sylvia Plath can be, behind a faded picture of a landscape or the sea or somesuch. For example “Don’t Leave Me” and a few trees in blossom behind the quote, the image itself having that faded look of 70s photos. These are the inverse of “LOLcats”.

I loath the uniformity of this bizarre cultural meme. I detest it, even though I love half-naked and naked models, and Bob Dylan. It’s cultural regurgitation. It’s as if all these films, people and photos are thrown into The Giant Mouth Of Culture, and somewhere, somewhere on the line the bits and pieces of culture get chopped up, and what ends up on tumblr is the end result. There’s no thought to it; it’s utterly emotion based. Actually, it’s less than that. It’s a reflex. And it’s creepy. Though really, it’s no different to how people tend to regurgitate what’s fed to them, culturally, in the Real World (see: Miley Cyrus, American Idol, Susan Boyle.)

The same “cultural reflex” pertains shops and people inside and outside the Dover Street Market. Later that day I was invited to the opening of an art exhibition- it was on a warm summer night in a gallery- I can’t remember the name- and people were everywhere getting drunk. There was a crowd on the terrace as we half-pushed/half-walked our way through. Most of them were wearing similar clothing: for the men, frames or wayfarers, half of them sporting a beard, and a flannel shirt. Their haircuts looked like what a fan of “Joy Division” would wear- as flat and slick as oil, though oddly combed. The woman- leggings, some nameless top, studs somewhere- on leggings or their blazer. One girl in particular looked like a try-hard version of the lady we went to the party with. Where one was chic, the try-hard looked like she could almost man a street corner.
The point here being that some “cultural reflex” had penetrated all these people (save us and the lady who came with us), as they were all dressed similar, all acting the same- an awkward James Dean not being James Dean very well. Most of them were getting drunk and about as far away as one could get from the art.

DSM attempts to distance itself from this cultural uniformity. For instance, I was just trying to find images of the Dover Street Market, yet none but one of the pictures I found correlates to what we saw inside the place when we were there. Whoever’s running it has an obsession with change. I can’t say I paid attention to many of the people on any of the floors, either, because there wasn’t many of them anyway. Generic fashion-looking people; as we were to encounter for the rest of our trip. Eventually you just start to phase them out and they become noise in the background. And I was phasing them out on the first day in London! I don’t know how many thousands of dark eyes I didn’t see.

At the front of the first floor there’s a couple of fossils, thousands of years old. A skull or two. It looks like a Damien Hirst exhibit. Tavi’s dad- Steve; Laia and I stand in front of the exhibit reading the little information card. “This fossil is x thousand years old”. The price is x thousands of dollars. Even museum exhibits are sold here, as in some bizarre dream of golden fashion and archeology. Just in case anybody wants to buy a x thousand-year-old skull, of course. One could always go to the natural history museum and attempt a robbery. It’d probably be cheaper.
I wonder at this point whether this is a designer skull. It must be, given the price! I imagine rows of skulls- Prada skulls, Comme des Garcons skulls, Chanel skulls. Each skull stamped with the logo of each respective house (or more accurately, brand.) It’s almost creepy, the selling of ancient skulls, almost reeking of twisted Victorian shops, selling skulls to weirdos in their tophats and peacoats. And I suppose some of that backwards Victorian feeling is deliberate: it’s called the Dover Street Market after all.

This place is a sort of Disneyland for fashion. It’s a flawed organic rustheap gimmick-laden wonderland of lust and sheer pleasure in the form of clothing. The Rei-clones are flawed, the merchandise is perfect and perfectly out of the price range of most who visit- hell, for boxers it costs thirty pounds- you can check that on the website (doverstreetmarket.com). I don’t know how to react to boxers that cost thirty pounds, but it doesn’t really matter because the Dover Street Market’s primary purpose, to people like me- who don’t have one thousand pounds lying around for a jacket (ie. Most of the world) is to be a whorehouse for the feeling up of clothes (Lanvin especially), and secondly to sell boxers for the sum of thirty pounds. I’m not buying any.

*Speaking of, I was walking behind two middle-aged businessmen who appeared to be from “The Office” the other day. I was on a quest to buy a number (n)ine jacket at a poisonous price, and these two businessmen started talking in front: “100% sales!” “profits will be converted 100%!” “the profit conversion..” What struck me, as the price of my jacket will surely do one day, was that these men sounded exactly like they were from “The Office.” They talked the exact same sort of business doubletalk that one expects from an episode of said television show. I giggled behind them, imitating them with my friend who was with me. They appeared oblivious, as you’d imagine characters from “The Office” to be.

(Images to be uploaded later, when I can be bothered resizing them.)