Vogue: How does she come up in the stores?
Erdem: You know, when we sat down to figure out what that initial store could be — Philip, not to speak for you, but your approach was quite forensic, wouldn’t you say? Like, what art would she collect? What furniture would she sit on? What carpet would be appropriate for her changing area?
Philip: In my mind, she’s a collage of many women who we know and actually wear the brand. So it’s a matter of imagining her environment, building a picture around her. But I think what’s interesting this time around is that we have had the Mayfair store for 10 years. There is this sort of awful trend now of store concepts being seen as disposable — that they have to constantly change.
It was very important to us when we did South Audley Street that the store felt timeless and enduring and permanent. And the really wonderful thing is that we literally have not touched it in 10 years, and it still feels great to be in. All these decisions surrounding the quality of the materials and the craftspeople we were working with were so carefully made at the beginning and that’s really paid off. We approached the making of Sloane Street in the same way. We just evolved the experience.
Vogue: Let’s get a little bit more technical. How did you make that work design-wise?
Philip: South Audley Street is in this 19th century building that still had some of the original historic fixtures, so you could play off that. In contrast, the Sloane Street store is in a lovely 1920s building, but quite a featureless retail space. So we thought of it more as a sort of atelier or her studio, and decided to collaborate with Robin Brown, who’s an incredibly talented production designer that we have also worked on shows with in the past. He worked with scenic painters to create a new language of wall panels and armatures. Armatures that support clothes rails, shelves, a vitrine, sculpture and for hanging artwork. The wall panels are wrapped in coarse canvas that were conceived as a single abstract artwork by scenic painters in the brand’s signature blue colour. We will have artwork in the store, too, to reinforce this idea of her as a collector.