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At the bottom of a grand stairwell in Paris’s Marais district, a young man in white sneakers and an oversized hoodie anxiously clutches his custom business cards—not for the hottest rapper or a viral influencer, but for Adrian Joffe, the mastermind behind Dover Street Market. Now, here’s a thought: When was the last time you saw someone treat a retail CEO like a rockstar? It’s a curious testament to the magnetic force of a retail empire that blurs the lines between art and commerce—a place where rules exist only to be broken and where fashion’s future is shaped with fearless creativity. Dover Street Market isn’t just a store; it’s a battleground for innovation in a landscape battered by shifting consumer habits and digital chaos. But how does one curiously crafted logo—a black house with a triangle roof—signal so much coolness and exclusivity in a world drowning in brands? Let’s dive deep into this beautiful chaos orchestrated by Adrian Joffe, where the alchemy of community and creativity spells success against all odds. LEARN MORE

At the bottom of a stately stairwell in a restored hôtel particulier in Paris’s trendy Marais neighborhood stands a young man in his early 20s, eagerly awaiting the arrival of his hero. He is dressed in a pair of white Salomon sneakers and an oversize hoodie, clutching a stack of business cards of his own design.

He is not waiting for the hottest rapper or some hypebeast-beloved designer. He is waiting for Adrian Joffe, the cofounder and CEO of Dover Street Market, the riotous collection of fashion stores that has found success melding artistry and commerciality.

The original Dover Street Market London.

The young man seizes his moment, approaching Joffe to pitch him on his line of tees and hoodies. “I greatly admire his work and the brands that he has in his shop,” the eager fan explains. Joffe, who is wearing his usual nondescript outfit of a black shirt and pants, warmly engages with him before politely excusing himself.

“Does that happen a lot?” I ask, taken aback that the energy reserved for a tabloid celebrity has been directed at Joffe. “Yes. It’s a little strange, to be honest,” he says.

It may be strange, but it’s not entirely surprising. Dover Street Market is a convergence of the institutional and the new. Over the past 20 years, it has become one of if not the most influential retail spaces in the world. It is perhaps the only retailer where the brand of the store is as identifiable as the brands that it stocks: The store’s de facto logo, its name stacked in white Helvetica font inside a black house with a triangle roof, is an if-you-know-you-know signpost among fashion’s most discerning shoppers. Dover Street’s success is a feat made all the more remarkable given the state of retail. Challenged for decades by shifting consumer behavior and countless digital disruptions, traditional multibrand retail is hanging on by a thread. Now, to win the retail game, you need to innovate, and Dover Street Market is leading the charge.

From left: DSM Kei Ninomiya Spring 2026, Simone Rocha Fall 2025.

Dover Street Market’s Paris location is in the former home of 17th-century aristocrat Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, who was renowned for her witty social commentary. While the original details of the baroque building still adorn the ceilings and railings, the store space is now carefully spliced together, separated by curved walls painted stark white, with brushed-chrome hanging fixtures. In its current iteration, it holds the collections of more than 130 brands, from establishment names such as Prada and Rick Owens to splashy upstarts like Denmark’s Nicklas Skovgaard and New York turned Parisian duo Vaquera. Then, of course, there are the iconoclastic designs of Comme des Garçons, designed by Rei Kawakubo, who is Dover Street Market’s other cofounder as well as Joffe’s life partner. Joffe and Kawakubo have often referred to Dover Street as a cataclysm of “beautiful chaos.” If Comme des Garçons is the spiritual uniform for fashion’s most dedicated disciples, then Dover Street Market is their place of worship.

Kawakubo is notoriously press-shy, granting only a small number of interviews throughout her six-decade career. Joffe, 72, acts as the spokesperson for the company, though he, too, is bashful in his demeanor. He speaks sagaciously, conscious he’s speaking for the collective, considering each sentence and its meaning—a manner perhaps informed by his years practicing Zen Buddhism.

Joffe was born in South Africa and grew up in London, where he studied Japanese, as well as Zen Buddhism, as a college student. He lived in Japan in his 20s but met Kawakubo when he was back in London in 1987, working for his sister Rose’s knitwear company. He acted as a translator for Kawakubo as she plotted the Comme des Garçons expansion in Europe. Joffe says it’s as close to a job interview as either one of them would allow. He joined the company first as a commercial director in Paris in 1987, and after a brief stint at Club Med as a creative director, he returned as president in 1993. “I was not asked [to come back],” he says. “I was ordered.” In 1992, Joffe and Kawakubo married at Paris’s Hôtel de Ville.

Simone Rocha

Joffe meets me on a busy spring day in the courtyard of the French store, where smiley security guards are counting people in and out with old-school digit clickers. He is stopped by friends and acquaintances who greet him with pleasantries as we make our way to his office, a generously sized white-and-steel room that mimics the store space, with a wide window centered on the back wall and a communal worktop and side benches in lieu of the typical CEO-style meeting table.

Dover Street Market is a collection of contradictions; its rule book is offered just to be ripped up, tropes of traditional retail be damned. Egalitarian in its approach, its stores forgo separating collections by category or price. The Row commingles with Chopova Lowena; Gucci is at home next to Supreme. The layout understands customers’ oscillating range of desires: that luxury and casualwear, or the longing for them, aren’t diametrically opposed. Kawakubo famously hates window displays, instead opting for blank space, and she conceived the Paris store to have walls obstructing its windows so that would-be customers can’t see the merchandise inside. At Dover Street, designers’ creativity is held sacred; outlandish ideas are encouraged and, even more surprisingly, sold. (I ask Joffe about a rumor I heard about a dress by Swedish designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson, made entirely of spoons and costing in the tens of thousands, being purchased at the Paris store. Joffe confirms, simply replying, “Yes.”)

London installations for Comme des Garçons

Today, algorithms influence what we want, and TikTokers preside over how to get it. Keyboard critics can drive the success of entire collections. Looming tariffs and the soaring cost of living have changed the way we shop. Yet Dover Street is a port in a fashion storm. It has global e-shops but doubles down on local brick and mortar. It takes huge bets on who it thinks will define the industry’s next generation. Dover Street is purposefully not trying to appeal to everyone; it features fashion’s most uncompromising brands and strategically caters to fashion’s most devoted followers. A Dover Street cosign is a symbol to the industry that you’ve made it, and sometimes Dover Street is simply the only one brave enough to take the risk. A trip to Dover Street Market is more akin to a visit to an art gallery than a retail space. Even members of its staff seem specifically chosen for their sartorial appeal. I push Joffe to reveal the rules. Who or what is in the DNA of Dover Street Market that makes it so unmistakably itself?

“But is the DNA the same as rules? I don’t think DNA is the same as rules,” Joffe quibbles.

“Fine, rules then,” I clarify.

“I like things to be exactly like what they are,” he says. “But that’s argumentative by nature, I suppose. For Dover Street, there are definitely unwritten rules, right? There does need to be rules. It can’t be anarchic; otherwise, you’re lost. You can do that on your own, but you can’t do it in a company, in a structure. Rules are good sometimes, but also rules are there to be broken. You can’t break the rules if you don’t have them. I think Dover Street is the DNA we wanted. It’s really about sharing space, believing in the synergy and the accidents that happen when two people come together when they’re next door and that 1 + 1 = 3 thing. I guess our DNA is about communities, our people. They’re so important. You know? We’ve also been very lucky. I don’t know how we are so lucky.”

Dover Street Market New York

Joffe and Kawakubo’s unorthodox approach to retail took shape in September of 2004, when the first Dover Street Market opened on London’s Dover Street, deep in an area of Mayfair that is distinctive for its Georgian architecture. It was then a sleepy enclave of the city, home to establishment art galleries and upper-crust members’ clubs, but Dover Street Market’s arrival and subsequent success turned Dover Street into a discreet yet powerful retail thoroughfare, with brands flocking to the street, hoping that some of Dover Street Market’s residual cool would transfer to them as if by osmosis.

The seed for Dover Street Market began with the Comme des Garçons “Guerilla Store” in Berlin’s Mitte district. It came together for just $2,500 and was designed to disappear within the year. The idea was to offer an antidote to the flashy fashion boutiques of its competitors, most of them armed with more money but fewer ideas. A 2004 story about the concept store by Cathy Horyn in The New York Times ran with the headline “You Shop Until It’s Dropped.”

Torishéju Dumi

“I remember Cathy Horyn came all the way from New York. And she said, ‘I’m going to put it on the front page,’” Joffe recounts. “So it became very well-known and successful. We did 47 of them in 10 years.” At that time, Browns, the renegade retailer famed for helping launch the careers of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, was preparing to close the Comme des Garçons franchise store that it operated in London. “The lease came up or something,” Joffe says. “I said to Rei, ‘Listen, maybe now’s the time to separate from Browns and do a direct store.’ ”

The couple had hoped to find a small store and house their office in the same building. “The agent offered us a building where we would have the ground floor and the basement, but then the landlord said that they were going to rent the upper floors to different people. And I said to her, ‘Oh, we don’t want different people coming through the shop and using the same elevator!’ Rei and I said, ‘Listen, why don’t we just take the whole building and we can take care of letting it out?’ And then the next step was, ‘Why don’t we just do the store and invite other people to come?’”

Torishéju installation, Paris, 2024.

All-In Fall 2025.

Kawakubo and Joffe took inspiration from London’s famed and now-defunct Kensington Market, a three-story indoor space beloved by the punks, ravers, and goths who upheld the city’s reputation as the home of emerging subcultures. “Rei loved the Kensington Market. She loved the way people could have their own area to do what they liked. It was an evolution of the Guerrilla Store. You could give a really cheap place to people.” The store opened with collections from Alber Elbaz of Lanvin, Raf Simons, and Azzedine Alaïa.

Joffe knew this new store couldn’t operate as their Guerilla operation had. “When we opened Dover Street, people all thought this was a Guerrilla Store. I said, ‘No, look at the cost. It’s more than $2,000!’ ” The build-out was, in fact, a few million pounds and a huge jump from those earlier pop-ups.

The store took a while to catch on before flourishing into what it is today: seven locations, including the original London store (which relocated in 2016 from its namesake Dover Street to the old Burberry headquarters on Haymarket), as well as New York, Los Angeles, Ginza, Beijing, Singapore, and Paris. Each store is similar in feeling but uniquely programmed. Most have a café (Rose Bakery, run by Joffe’s sister, Rose Carrarini), and some have a bookshop curated by rare book purveyor Idea. Artist Yayoi Kusama and Sex Pistols art director Jamie Reid have taken over window installations. “You can’t plan creation,” says Joffe. “You have to be open to it. Just look at molecules.” Their alchemy seems to be working: Dover Street Market’s annual sales figures across its five direct stores are in excess of $160 million.

Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbø of All-In.

The shoot for the photo that accompanies this story happened in Paolo Roversi’s studio in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. An expansive library and darkroom lead to a narrow spiral staircase that opens into a loft space where Joffe, dressed in an understated Comme des Garçons shirt and blazer, is flanked by the current cast of designers that embody the Dover Street Market ecosystem and ethos, all purposefully dressed in white and in their own designs. The coquettish confections of Simone Rocha stand shoulder to shoulder with the extremity of shape and form of Matières Fécales’s and Torishéju Dumi’s manipulation of traditional tailored silhouettes. (Kendall Jenner wore a custom Torishéju creation for this year’s Met Gala.) In the Dover Street solar system, Joffe is the sun.

“Adrian is like a father figure to me, and I respect him so much. Dover Street Market has always been my dream, from the fucking start,” Dumi tells me, tears welling up in her eyes. “Not only does Adrian help me with business stuff and the development of my line, but he also calls me up to check if I am okay. He’s one in a million. I am thankful to him for actually understanding who I am and just letting me be me.”

Dover Street Market New York

Joffe doesn’t always feel like a father figure. “It’s weird. I don’t feel my age,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like a little boy and we are doing it together. But then some days I do feel like a daddy, yes.”

Throughout our time together, Joffe never uses the word Ibut rather we, understanding that Dover Street Market’s legacy is only as good as the talent he nurtures. While Dover Street’s support may look like altruism, Joffe insists that “it’s a two-way street.” He continues, “It’s that exchange. That’s what Dover Street is fed on, what it’s nourished by.” To that end, Dover Street Market has dedicated resources to assist young designers with brand development, including helping with production, design, and manufacturing, as well as giving young designers a built-in platform to reach an audience. Torishéju, ERL, Róisín Pierce, and Vaquera are current participants, and Simon Porte Jacquemus and the not-for-profit Sky High Farm Workwear are alumni.

Olympia Schiele

“Dover Street really is coming from Joffe and his feelings,” says Benjamin Barron, one half of the Parisian womenswear duo All-In, which creates deconstructed designs out of repurposed garments. Dover Street was an early supporter.

“They’re very anti all the rules that are meant to make things work,” adds his codesigner, Bror August Vestbø.

Each designer I speak with echoes the same sentiment: Dover Street’s care for its designers is remarkable. “They respect you to come to the table with your own voice and your own ideas. There’s no one like that,” says Simone Rocha, who has been stocked at Dover Street for over a decade. (Joffe bought her collection right after she graduated from Central Saint Martins.) “A lot of the designers are newer than me, but I am really happy to be here as a testament to his commitment, loyalty, and openness to bring young designers in but then also stick with them.”

If Rocha represents the Dover Street–anointed designers who are already on their way to becoming fashion’s next mononyms, then Matières Fécales heralds the next generation. The DJ duo turned designers, whose post-apocalyptic-inspired look—bald heads and carbon-black winged liner taken up to the temples—had amassed a large Instagram following, met Joffe backstage at a Madonna concert. (The two were opening for her and made costumes for her tour.) Joffe inquired about their designs, and in March 2025 the pair debuted at Paris Fashion Week. “For him to be able to foreshadow something without any physical proof is really his talent,” says Steven Raj, one half of Matières Fécales. “Hannah [Rose] and I, we’re nobodies. We don’t come from Central Saint Martins and that whole trajectory. We didn’t work for any big brands. We don’t have the résumé. What we needed was someone like Adrian: somebody in the industry who is a leader, who has power, who is credible and could take us to the next level. And he really has.”

Joffe is rarely content to stay still, constantly looking for ways to innovate and to discover the new and the next. He’s known to go to designers’ studios deep in unglamorous parts of fashion’s capitals in search of the next great idea, knowing talent that embodies Dover Street’s ideals comes from places off the beaten path.

Hannah Rose and Steven Raj

“He’s built this huge empire, [yet] he’s so youthful with the ideas he brings up when he gets in a conversation about something that you do creatively,” says Olympia Schiele of Louther, who’s carried at Dover Street Market in London and was a photography and product-design student before pivoting to fashion. “Being carried at Dover Street is on everyone’s vision board. I never thought I was going to get there. But he sees something in people. He believes in them.”

“It’s so instinctual,” Joffe replies when I ask who he decides to stock. “There are criteria, but this business is very difficult. Right? I think people don’t know how tough it is. My main criterion is that they are nice people. And then they have to have a vision—what they want to do, where they see themselves—and do it without treading on anybody. It’s about doing your own thing, finding your own space, and being fearless and really having a story to tell. It’s having a sense of humor, for fuck’s sake! That’s so important.”

Comme des Garçons installation, Dover Street Market Ginza, 2025.

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus space, Dover Street Market Ginza, 2025.

Joffe understands the power of his position, as someone who can bring in those who may not have the same access, privilege, or opportunity as others. Under his stewardship, Dover Street Market continues to widen the possibilities of what fashion is and who it’s for. A trip to Dover Street isn’t predicated on the size of one’s wallet but rather the heft of your imagination, what you can wear, and how you can participate. No matter your proximity to the stores, you’ve felt its impact; a class of designers, past and present, has been emboldened to design more daringly, thanks to Joffe’s ability to find a commerciality in being anticommercial.

The counterintuitive programming of its stores has inspired even the most establishment of fashion houses. From voguing parties to photo-book signings to poetry readings, Dover Street Market doesn’t just traffic in clothes; it also spins fantasy. “It’s a dangerous time; things are precarious, things are tough, but out of great suffering comes great creation. The Renaissance came out of the Dark Ages,” Joffe says. “We have to be optimistic and keep helping each other. But again, it’s not [about being] the best. It’s to be the best in what you are and what you do rather than the best of everything.”

This story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

Hair: Christophe Pastel; makeup: Yvane Rocher for M.A.C Cosmetics; production: Studio Demi; set design: Jean-Hugues de Châtillon

Opening image from left: Hannah Rose and Steven Raj, both of Matières Fécales, and Simone Rocha; all clothing, their own designs. Adrian Joffe; all clothing, his own. Torishéju Dumi of Torishéju; clothing, her own designs. Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbø of All-In; all clothing, their own. Olympia Schiele of Louther; clothing, her own designs.