Meet the Dover Street Market family

Today is one of those sweltering summer days and inside our photography studio mild chaos is unfolding.

After finally finding somewhere to park, the collector and 1970s nightlife legend Michael Costiff has turned up with a vintage spear and is waving it around with impish glee in front of the videographer. The fashion designer Charles Jeffrey has dashed in late and is in the make-up chair perfecting a full face of Blitz Kids face paint. While the jeweller Castro Smith is finishing off some last-minute designs in the corner, the taxidermist Emma Hawkins is wondering where to put her stuffed magpie. Jorja Smith tracks are blaring, an industrial grade fan is spluttering, and Choux Choux, a tiny fluffy dog belonging to the designer Katie Roberts-Wood, is being bribed to sit on a mid-century prop chair.

Welcome to the Dover Street Market family. This glorious ragtag assembly of creatives has turned out to celebrate 15 years since the department store opened its doors — and each has their own DSM story to tell. 

The store began life on Dover Street in 2004, but moved to Haymarket (prompted by a hike in Mayfair rents) in 2016. It is the unique alchemy of DSM’s strict resistance to homogeneity, its brilliant creativity and some of the most astute and trailblazing buying in the business.

Those who cross the DSM threshold for the first time will find the lack of strip lighting, clammy changing rooms and sterile white walls — basic shopping codes of the high street that seem evermore irrelevant in the age of one-click ordering — hugely refreshing. Since its inception, DSM has been a warren of impressive installations and conceptual mini shops, with an egalitarian shop floor (other department stores charge fashion houses for space) where the most prestigious names in fashion — the Guccis, the Celines — jostle hanger by hanger with the young, the unheard of (Roberts-Wood’s first collection upon graduating, for example) and the underground (Palace Skateboards, before everyone was wearing it). To be a DSM patron is a contemporaneous cultural signifier that tells everyone that your sense of taste is simply beyond being in the know. To be stocked there, say brands, is a bit of a badge of honour. 

‘It has validated our brand and put us into a context which I feel has made other people see us in a different light,’ Charles Jeffrey tells me.  

At its helm is the matriarch Rei Kawakubo, the founder and designer of Comme des Garçons, who the designers talk about in revered tones. By virtue of being stocked at DSM, most of them have met her.

‘The business works because at the root of it is Rei Kawakubo’s indisputable talent. Her presence is inarguable,’ says David Owen, of bookseller Idea Books. Along with her husband Adrian Joffe, the shop’s vice-president Dickon Bowden and its team of buyers, Kawakubo trawls showrooms, graduate shows and Instagram in order to bring together the most interesting designers on the planet. Not just that, DSM provides connections for them, encourages them to push their boundaries and even sorts them out with places to live and work. 

‘Dickon found me on Instagram while I was working as an apprentice at Goldsmiths,’ says Castro Smith, who is from Newcastle. ‘They asked me to do a set of hand-carved rings, which sold out. Then I went to Japan for a year on a maker’s grant. I had an interview with DSM Ginza and the manager of the store offered me a room with her and her family.’ Back in London, on hearing that Smith was carving jewellery in his bedroom, the team hooked him up with Sarabande, Alexander McQueen’s charity foundation, where he now works. For Smith and other designers it’s more than a foot in the door. ‘Before I didn’t have an understanding of the fashion industry or how to run my own business,’he says. ‘DSM has given me a platform to live off my own work.’