Fashion Retail

With over 200 sumptuous photographs, Fashion Retail reveals how the world’s top labels (including Prada, Hèrmes, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Louis Vuitton) have revolutionised fashion-retail design. Since the late 1990s, designers have realised that the perfect showcase for their cutting-edge clothes are inspirational, innovative stores, created by like-minded architects and interior designers. From London, Paris and Milan to New York and Tokyo, shops are being refitted in a whole range of styles from fantastical 1970s-inspired futurism to pure minimalism. Like the clothes, the emphasis is on the ingenious use of both new and classic materials, with surprising angles and unexpected inspirations.

With a new preface and 28 of the latest, beautiful, fashion-retail stores designed by architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Heatherwick, Renzo Piano, Marc Newson, Future Systems and Herzog & de Meuron, this new edition of the highly acclaimed Fashion Retail shows how the top labels in the world are continuing to match radical couture with radical architecture and interiors. The new edition also highlights how accessory brands such as Longchamp have come to the fore with adventurous interiors, while department stores worldwide are being redesigned to compete at the highest level. 

As Fashion Retail reveals, the labels and architects are embracing the challenges of the internet by ensuring that the stores are the ultimate, experiential destinations for the customers, whose expectations of stylish shopping environments are higher than ever. Leading international designers are also responding to the blurring of the boundaries between fashion, art and entertainment, while the high-profile success of fashion-retail interiors has led brands to cross over into other areas of cutting-edge design such as hotels.

Eleanor Curtis is a London-based writer and photographer whose work has featured in UK and international broadsheets and journals. She is a graduate of the University of Sussex and has been a research fellow at the Royal College of Art, London. She has published three books with Wiley-Academy: Hotel Interior Structures (2001/2003), School Builders and Club Culture (2003).

Howard Watson is a writer and editor specialising in the arts and culture. He has contributed to many publications, including The Independent and Architectural Design, and edited a wide range of titles on architecture and the arts. He is also the author of The Design Mix (2006), Hotel Revolution and Bar Style (both 2005), for John Wiley & Sons Ltd.