The Last Concept Store
10 Corso Como opened in Milan in 1990. Carla Sozzani converted a former parking garage in the Porta Garibaldi neighbourhood into a bookshop, a gallery, a restaurant, a garden and a fashion store. She did not ask what the market wanted. She built the place she wanted to exist in and waited for the market to catch up.
The concept store is the retail format that refuses to be only retail. It insists that the objects it sells exist in a context — cultural, intellectual, aesthetic — that is as important as the objects themselves. You do not go to 10 Corso Como to buy a jacket. You go to understand what kind of jacket belongs in the same room as those books, that photography, that garden.
Dover Street Market opened in London in 2004. Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo described it as "a place where a carefully chosen group of creative people from various fields gather under the same roof in a spirit of beautiful chaos." The beautiful chaos is the point. The objects do not agree with each other in the way a conventional store's objects agree. They argue. The argument is what makes you think.
Slam Jam in Milan is a concept store that has been making the same argument since 1989. The argument is that underground culture — music, art, subcultural fashion — is as worthy of a considered retail environment as any luxury house. The objects on the shelves have ranged from military surplus to Stussy to Undercover to Carhartt to collaborations that exist nowhere else. The thread is not category. The thread is attitude.
These stores are disappearing. Not because the concept failed. Because the concept succeeded so completely that the market absorbed it. Every retail brand now has a concept store in the sense that every brand now has a playlist and a scented candle. The format became a strategy and strategies can be copied.
What cannot be copied is the original question. Carla Sozzani did not ask what a concept store should be. She asked what she wanted to exist in the world. The answer was 10 Corso Como.
That question is still the right one. The format is just harder to find now.
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