Encroaching Coats
Last week I visited Los Angeles’ infamous Dover Street Market outpost and found myself bombarded with coats. It was sweltering that day, and I felt humbled in my ragged jorts and sweaty tee shirt admiring the layers of wool and mohair. These coats lining the corners and sidelines of the store flanking the biannual 70% sale were a firm message: fall is here, summer is no more.
These are logistical semantics. DSM epitomizes fashion’s plastic sense of seasonality and globalist curve as much as any department store - it’s cold enough somewhere for a coat, so why not make it a Sacai trench? DSM is curated in a delightfully snobbish and exacting manner while retaining an arm’s distance embrace of whatever is most desirable. New CFDA fashion fund nominee Melitta Baumeister’s bulbous dresses face manicured Jacquemues mini bags, the first brands you’ll see when entering are Gucci and Balenciaga, then dark CDG Black and chaotic Vaquera. Here, adding something for the clout chasers and hypebeasts will do, so long as it pays the bills.
There are few items that signify commitment to a brand, philosophically and monetarily, like a coat. Dover stocks brands who already require customers to see their clothing as investments, from a 50 dollar Noah shirt to a 300$ button down in polyester - a coat lies at the top of that food chain. Moreover, this is Dover Street Market Los Angeles, where even a slightly long Stussy jacket is hard to justify, let alone a Junya parka for five below zero.
Hilariously, Sacai offered one of the most conservative options with their stiff bonding coat with its ballooning billow and inhuman softness. Undercover opts for nylon and cotton with its zip coat complete with zippers up the arms, less expensive and slightly more modish than the Rick Owens version with pointed shoulders around the corner. For the superfans of these designers somewhere between legacy and cult is a slew of almost-basics - everyday items warped ever so slightly to associate with the larger aesthetic. They are coats for true believers.
The stakes rise. Martine Rose adds a set of sleeves to her brilliant Nike trench coats in black and tan, Prada adds a second collar, elongates it, and connects it with some cashmere on its luxurious coat. These are the uniforms of major athletes and Jeff Goldblum, these are the coats of those with an exactitude for the fashion moment. Their oddnesses are particular, but slices of some of the most generally desirable work around today.
DSM also makes just as diverse a case for fashion’s indie underbelly, especially if that underbelly is English. Simone Rocha, a longtime DSM client offers a striking elongated bomber with puffed sleeves and an amazing technical cord that transforms into a bow at the wrists. Chopova Lowena offers a more classically dramatic coat of lace and silver buttons and is funnily enough the only coat I find on sale (still above 1k). These are products that cannot afford to lose their flare - still the result of growing fanbases and developing aesthetics. They are worth their price, but they still seek something to prove.
These coats were mostly part of the FW23 season creeping into DSM as the sale winded down. Thus, your options were to wade through racks of untapped opportunities, dreams of walks in parks at 60 degrees, and bright futures, or to pick through the rejects and spoils of a multi month long sale, believing you can flip the 30% off Supreme, or wear an Online Ceramics shirt that’s a size too small. Regardless of your intention, the staff will clock you as one or the other, and both parties are judged for different reasons. Sometimes, if one is too self conscious, they will never win.
Beyond this slew of the unattainable, impossible, and irresponsible is the brand that built the halls that holds its fantasy. To come to DSM for Comme des Garçons is a purer, yet altogether more fanatical pursuit. Here is where the products differ from globalized stock lists and itemizations, growing obscure and random to the point of ephemerality. Here, one will see a garment that they may find ridiculous - frilled pants, a furry blazer, a crestless shirt - and then unexpectedly mourn its disappearance. You will never see it again, unless on the backs of the terrifyingly stylish and woefully wealthy.
And so, at the end of the long road of judgment and coats and their shifting placements in the zeitgeist is a coat which defies it all. It is the most expensive, the most unwieldily, the most ubiquitous, and yet the most inevitably obscure, and the least possible for one who is a men’s large to wear. It is the Comme Des Garçons Comme Des Garçons “Ladie’s Coat“, a layer of black floral cutouts on a pristine white coat. Here is a coat that will never protect you, never keep you warm, never keep you dry. Here is the coat the others are sold in the service of. It is not on sale, and it never will be. There is no link for one, and unless a wealthy one culls it from their closet there never will be.
The Fall
I returned to Dover Street Market this week to see a space no longer divided by judgment and the dregs of seasons past. This week was DSMLA’s first embracing FW23, a new store organization, and new blood. Change was in the air.
This is the best time to visit DSM in my opinion. Customers are relegated mainly to those searching intensely for specific garments from new designers, meaning they’re fans and thus more passionate and fewer in numbers. This means it’s easier to know who actually works there and who’s searching for the latest Rick Owens boot. Because the slate is clear, no major “drops“, no overabundance of hype, and a smaller customer base, judgment runs less high. It is also a moment in which one can experience complete freshness - a new garment or direction, a new field of unexpected desires. It is a moment to take stock.
With Raf Simons’ namesake brand officially shuttered, Kiko Kostadinov and his sleek nylons and workwear inventions was upgraded from its back-of-house alleyway to an impressive arc of industrial red hangers and alien-pink furniture. Perhaps it was sales, perhaps a longtime coming logistical move stalled by tradition, but regardless it provides Kostadinov with a focus in the store equivalent to major players long connected to CDG like Undercover. Taking his previous space is Chopova Lowena, now essentially knighted as indie stalwart (perhaps it’s the influence of her carabiner skirts, perhaps it’s her expansion to menswear).
Walking in the door, I turned and saw Balenciaga tatters. No thanks. I turned to see the state of poor limbo-afflicted Gucci and find they have been entirely banished from the temple of cool, replaced by the pale baby blues and modernist furniture of Miu Miu. Mini skirts, ballet flats, archive appeasing cargo bags, and sharp sunglasses rule - gone is Gucci’s slice of a Hollywood ballroom peddling logomania and deep colorful suits. It’s been a long time coming. Gucci has grown less and less desirable in the last five years thanks to Balenciaga, but it still seems a signifying shift. It is a reminder that DSM is as committed to the dollar as it is to its art, and that Dover’s moneymakers will always be more useful in that regard than for their lasting integrity. Balenciaga, long since ceding to Prada and Loewe, are undoubtedly next.
Beyond the changing tides of status quo indie and mainstream reflected in garment and space, the real excitement comes from everything CDG. Here are the collections that will stock sporadically, that will disappear and never return. This is a quieter changing of the guard, a turnover less violent and competitive and marked instead like the opening of a new exhibition. It is an unobtrusive recontextualization of space.
This moment takes the specialness of discovering the ephemeral floral coat or finding the CDG Black buckle shirt that reappears twice a year and multiplies it by every CDG division. There were suede sets of shorts, pants, and shirts in luminous greens and purples at Comme Des Garcons Shirt. A blazer covered on one side with fur, another with square holes, yet another with a bulbous puffed back all lined the racks at Comme Des Garcons Homme. These curiosities are only temporary mysteries - they debut at DSM and eventually make their way to the e-shop, then more varied retailers.
This will not occur every time. CDG Homme’s Lewis Leather motorcycle boots from this season in all their red-strapped glory may never see the bright white backgrounds of online retail, their subtle paneling and abundance of straps separated for the small footed obsessives who manage to snatch them. Even more doubtful is the prospect of CDG Homme’s George Cox collaboration traveling far from CDG walls, this year showing off a bald and rubbery white toe. They seem like appropriate shoes for few yet the small acts of their inversion in brown suede paneling and odd rubbery bottom tantalize.
I didn’t manage to take a picture of the Junya Watanabe women’s leather jacket I tried on. It cut wide and cropped on me, replete with ruffled and crinkled leather and endless straps and buckles. Since Junya’s menswear is known for fitting small, it was a revelation to fit in this jacket I so perilously craved. It made my outfit look like a Picasso painting, scrambled and encoded my sense of self in a cascade of folded leather. I lost my opportunity for a picture when a DSM employee stopped by to compliment my choice - I had been spotted as one of the men who shopped for Junya’s womenswear, a road taken by maniacs with engorged wallets and vivid dreams. I tried not to let this moment, a compliment from someone who works at Dover Street Market, clog my ego, and so I began looking through the selection of Junya’s parachute pants. I was lost down a new road.
It is ironic that of the new Junya men’s collection, my favorite piece ended up online at a Toronto store called capsule, suggesting an eventual wide release. It caught my eye among many, many black blazers and motorcycle pants as one of Watanabe’s most sought after designs - his backpack jackets. Reselling for thousands, these jackets are usually collaborations with Karrimor or the North Face that involve meshing the construction of a backpack and jacket. This one was unbranded and a size too small. It fit like a glove.
Dover Street Market is not an opportunity to reinscribe all clothing as art, just as it isn’t a space to blindly sell whatever is deemed cool. At its best, Dover Street Market is a sort of exposure therapy to the edge of clothing possibilities and a curation for a broad sector of tastes of ways to expand taste. When a garment pierces the noise of trend or previous conception, rearranges taste and identity and carves a new path forged without logic or financial stability, the store has done its job.
I left Dover dreaming of useless and essential floral coats. I left spiting my messenger bag, cursing its attachment from my body. I left starry eyed at previous impossibilities, of sculptural leathers and bald rubber toe caps. who knows what I will come to desire next time I open those doors.