Miu Miu store is Tokyo’s latest design destination

The Miu Miu store in Tokyo, like its big sister Prada, is a design destination as well as a shopping one.

EMBARGO FOR WISH 5 June 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Herzog and De Meurion's Prada store in Tokyo Pic : supplied

It’s rare that a city’s most famous contemporary building should be a luxury fashion boutique; but this is Tokyo, where shopping is almost a national pastime and some of the most daring architectural projects over the past two decades have been done in the name of luxury.

When Prada’s flagship store in the city’s Aoyama district, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, opened in 2003 it not only redefined what a retail store could be; it was also an architectural fashion statement that eclipsed all others and became something of a tourist attraction in the Japanese capital. Visitors to Tokyo flocked to the bubble-like glass structure as much to see and photograph it — or fondle its fur-covered display racks — as to try on and buy the merchandise.

Now the Prada Group has built another store in Tokyo designed by Herzog & de Meuron, this time for Prada’s sister brand Miu Miu. It is diagonally across the street from the famous Prada store, which many think is Herzog & de Meuron’s finest building — not least the architects themselves. “When you look at that building, which is now 12 years old, it is certainly one of our most perfect buildings,” Jacques Herzog told WISH at the opening of the Miu Miu store in Tokyo earlier this year. “Without being arrogant, this building survives very well and is still very fresh and I think it’s very important that we make a statement with a building that goes beyond fashion or being à la mode.”

The Basel-based Herzog & de Meuron is one of the most in-demand architectural firms working today. It was awarded the Pritzker prize in 2001, and although it is most famous for its design of large public buildings — such as the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games and the Tate Modern in London — the firm has worked with Prada for many years on a range of projects, including the sets for a production of Verdi’s Attila at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2010. Herzog describes the work with Prada as a continuing collaboration. “We have an ongoing intellectual exchange and I think it’s very important that this building, as much as the previous one, is seen as the result of a collaboration and that it’s not just an architect doing a building for a fashion company.”

It is a unique architect/client relationship, he says. “Prada for sure is one of the most innovative fashion companies, and Miuccia Prada [creative director and, with her husband Patrizio Bertelli, major shareholder in the company] is an extraordinary intellectual mind … so the collaboration is something that expresses important elements of how we perceive time and the transformation of time and how buildings have to respond to that.”

Fashion by its nature is transient — a collection lasts for just a season and novelty is the industry’s oxygen. And just as a brand reinvents itself with its clothing collections every six months (or every three months if you include cruise and pre-fall collections), there is an unwritten wisdom that it needs to reinvent the decor of its retail spaces every few years as well. What’s unusual about the work that Prada and Herzog & de Meuron produce is that it is designed for permanence. That may be at least in part because this kind of retail design doesn’t come cheap — the Prada store in Aoyama is reported to have cost $80 million when it was built in 2003. When the building works, however, it can become a beacon for the brand, almost like architectural advertising.

The Prada store has diamond-shaped glass windows in various formations— some are concave, some convex and others flat, almost as though the building is breathing and drawing its customers in. The smaller Miu Miu store, by contrast, is at first glance an uninviting, windowless metal box. “It’s like a box that you have to discover, you have to make an effort,” says Herzog. “The site was very small and we could not have made a glass building here, it would be ridiculous and almost blown away. So to make it compact and to use steel was really the first step. The building, unlike the Prada one, is much more like a private home. It’s about being small and closed and about making a different statement.”

The Miu Miu store is essentially a grey steel rectangular crate with one side slightly opened and only just revealing the two-level store inside. A casual passer-by almost wouldn’t guess that the building is in the business of selling fashion; along one side of the steel box is what looks like a long display window, but is in fact just a mirror-polished strip of the steel façade. But the underside of the matte grey steel has been clad in shiny copper to contrast with the drab exterior. “The copper is a more fluid and soft material and is very feminine in contrast to the more masculine steel,” says Herzog. “In combination with other materials like stone, leather, wood and especially fabric, the inside is really about this sensual quality that makes Miu Miu so special and such a different brand from Prada.”

Herzog & de Meuron have designed every aspect of the Miu Miu Aoyama store, down to the coat hangers. It’s what Herzog describes as a “complete building, one where every single square inch has been developed exclusively for the client”. Both buildings are freestanding, and that’s about the only thing they have in common from a design perspective. “We wanted the buildings to be totally different because Prada is one identity and Miu Miu is a totally different personality,” says Herzog. Yet in an architectural sense they talk to another. It’s almost impossible to consider one without considering the other, and perhaps that’s the point. Design-conscious tourists to Tokyo have a new sight to see.