Tickled pink: Why Mecca’s latest collaboration is meaningful for founder Jo Horgan

Mecca founder Jo Horgan has secured Comme Des Garcons’ first perfume collaboration in 15 years, with a limited-edition fragrance in her stores.

Comme des Garcon and Dover Street Market's Adrian Joffe and Jo Horgan in Melbourne. ‘We always like the idea of collaborating, the energy and synergy that come from accidents when people come together,’ says Joffe. Picture: supplied

Beauty behemoth Mecca founder and co-chief executive Jo Horgan still remembers the first time she entered a Dover Street Market store. The experience of what its founders – iconoclastic Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and her business and life partner Adrian Joffe, chief executive of Commes Des Garcon International and president of Dover Street Market – call a “beautiful chaos” is not easily forgotten.

The concept started in London in 2004 when Kawakubo – whose brand Comme Des Garcons is at the centre of the National Gallery of Victoria’s summer blockbuster Westwood|Kawakubo – opened the first iteration in London. The idea centred on collaboration and community, putting high fashion into a format reminiscent of a street market.

“The truly mind-blowing moment of Dover Street Market, suddenly they were in my realm of retail (on) a much bigger scale … visual merchandising installations that were mad, walking into almost theatre sets but without trying to be overly glamorous, (but) authentic. And there was colour, texture, verticality. There were different labels, there were collaborations, different installations, there was bare space. There was this whimsy to it,” says Horgan.

At Dover Street Market you can find the most desired and cultish fashion brands alongside up-and-coming labels without any kind of categorisation. A common link, Joffe says, is brands with “a story to tell”.

Kawakubo can’t bear window displays but she designs the overall concept and interior of the spaces and oversees the art curation in the Paris outpost’s courtyard. She then leaves the choices of designers and events to her teams. Kawakubo remains always, Joffe says, their “guiding light”. Her eye is on everything.

There are now Dover Street Market outposts in Tokyo, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore and Beijing.

The Comme Des Garcons Zero Than Pink fragrance, available at Mecca.

Horgan is speaking to The Australian at an event with Joffe at her groundbreaking retail concept, Mecca Bourke Street in Melbourne, all 4000sq m of which opened to great and deserved fanfare in August.

The space includes an apothecary, a florist, rotating displays of art from female artists, a cafe, and you can get everything from your nails to your hair done. The idea behind it, as Horgan has said, was to make it a destination for tourists and locals alike. In this there is a deep affinity between both brands’ approach to retail and the way they want customers to feel.

As Joffe puts it, “Energy, inspiration, uplifting of the spirit, curiosity and I guess just new experiences and feeling part of something, community.”

Earlier this month Kawakubo, Joffe and Dover Street Market vice-president Dickon Bowden received the Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator at the Fashion Awards in London.

Like Horgan, Joffe says he believes in tactile shopping experiences. “Bricks-and-mortar retail is very important,” he said at the event.

“More and more, the online experience cannot be that satisfying in the end. We have to carry on making places where people come and meet. I think the future of brick-and-mortar shops is very strong. I think people are going to be needing that more and more – we hope. We always like the idea of collaborating, the energy and synergy that come from accidents when people come together.”

Last Friday the two brands launched an exclusive collaboration, a pink-wrapped version of the Comme Des Garcons fragrance Zero by perfumer Fanny Bal. There will be just 155 bottles of Zero Than Pink, available only at Mecca. The project is the first collaboration the brand’s perfumes division has done in 15 years.

It fits with how Joffe sees effective collaboration. “Only when the one-and-one makes three,” says Joffe, who was in Melbourne for the NGV gala and Westwood|Kawakubo opening.

Kawakubo is a prolific collaborator, working with everyone from Nike to Speedo. She is also an unusual collaborator, Joffe notes: “The best collaborations are the ones based in trust. (Kawakubo) either leaves everything to them or they leave everything to her. She doesn’t like brainstorming. It’s a very unusual way, she starts a collaboration. She doesn’t want to sit down and talk about who does what. She says: ‘OK, I leave it to you or they leave it to me.’ I think not many collaborations work like this, right?”

The partnership with Comme Des Garcons Parfums is meaningful to Horgan in other ways, too. Just as clothes from the brand push ideas of beauty, taste and purpose of fashion, the fragrances also are unlike anything else. The brand was one of the first stocked by Mecca when Horgan added them to her line-up in 2001 and Kawakubo designed the display for the perfumes sold at Mecca Bourke Street.

Rei Kawakubo designed the display for Comme Des Garcons Parfums at Mecca Bourke Street in Melbourne.

Mecca head of fragrance Virginia Woodger says the brand does fragrance on its own terms.

“What makes Comme des Garcons Parfums so extraordinary is their unwavering commitment to creation in its purest form,” Woodger says. “They don’t chase trends; they invent new olfactive ideas that the rest of the industry eventually follows. Every fragrance begins with a concept, a provocation, a question, and from there they build something that challenges the senses and expands what a perfume can be.”

Comme Des Garcons Parfums “nose” and creative director Christian Astuguevieille captures in the scents notes such as concrete, bleach or tar, and almost all of them are genderless. The first in 1994 was described by Kawakubo as “a perfume that works like a medicine and behaves like a drug”.

“No one has been able to follow in your footsteps. Nobody else has gotten ahead of you on the path you’re on. You really are forging a totally unique approach to fragrance,” Horgan told Joffe in an onstage Q&A later in the evening.

For Joffe, the fragrances are just another way – a new olfactory language, really – to show what Comme Des Garcons means.

“That’s what we tried to do for 31 years – just another way of expressing the values of Comme des Garcons.”

Comme Des Garcons Less Than Pink is available now at Mecca.