LONDON — Christopher Kane is the latest British designer to move into Mount Street, joining fellow London-based creatives Roksanda Ilincic, Nicholas Kirkwood, Roland Mouret, Solange Azagury-Partridge and Jenny Packham on the Mayfair thoroughfare.
The shop, Kane’s first ever, was designed by him and the minimalist architect John Pawson. The store will open today on the eastern end of the street, not far from Berkeley Square, and next to Kirkwood’s flagship.
The unit, at 6-7 Mount Street, spans 4,100 square feet over two floors, and boasts a mix of street — and historic — details such as corrugated dressing-room walls covered in soft velvet fabric, neon Perspex display boxes, and Portland stone floors.
The flagship is housed in a former hair salon, and the building, like others on the street, was built in the late-19th century, in Queen Anne revival style. The ground floor, which stocks women’s wear, is flooded with natural light and has high ceilings, vast bay windows fitted with bespoke sofas, and flexible features.
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Accessories are displayed on neon Perspex boxes and shelves — some of which are lit with LEDs — in green, pink or slate gray, while curved clothing rails on wheels have Perspex shells around them. Stainless steel door handles in half-moon shapes are by the late Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata.
A long, stainless steel clothing rack shoots across the room’s far wall and leads to a big, circular staircase. The staircase curls around a large, columnar hanging light fixture, like a totem pole, made from glass cylinders. Downstairs is home to more women’s wear, and Kane’s men’s collection.
“This is the first time we will be able to present the entire universe of what we do and interact directly with our customer, really getting to know and understand them,” said Kane.
The designer said he admires Pawson’s work, and the architect and his team “instantly understood what I wanted to achieve with the store.” The designer is planning to celebrate the opening with a party at the end of March.
Pawson, who famously designed the Calvin Klein Collection store in New York in the mid-Nineties, said one of the consistent threads running through Kane’s collections is their architectural quality, “a preoccupation with proportion, scale, geometry and construction detail.”
He added he feels a natural affinity with the way Kane uses texture, pattern and new combinations of materials to create something that is “pristine and modern, but also very sensuous. Fashion is about emotional resonances as much as it is about the physical details of cloth, cut, silhouette and texture. The architecture — if you get it right — provides a context for these emotional resonances.”